SUPPLEMENT. 1239 



take the opportunity of begging you to warn all intending 



visitors to Naples against the eating of oysters 



The locality in which the oysters are kept has always been 

 a very foul one. The oyster beds lie in comparatively 

 stagnant water, close to the embouchure of drains opening 

 into the sea ; and now that a retaining wall has been built 

 outside the site of these beds, with the view of ultimately 

 reclaiming the land on which they lie, there is no circula- 

 tion of water whatever. . . . You will, I trust, in the 

 interest of the travelling public, pardon me for writing to 

 you thus fully." 



PROFESSOR HUXLEY ON OVERDREDGING. 



It is the opinion of almost all who have studied the 

 subject that any natural bed may be in time destroyed by 

 over-fishing perhaps not by removing all the oysters, but 

 by breaking up the colonies, and delivering over the terri- 

 tory which they once occupied to other kinds of animals- 

 by barging the breeding oysters, by covering up the pro- 

 jection suitable for the reception of spat, and by breaking 

 down, through the action of heavy dredges, the ridges 

 which are especially fitted to be the seats of colonies. 



Even Professor Huxley, the most ardent of all 

 opponents of fishery legislation, while denying that oyster 

 beds are being permanently annihilated by dredging, prac- 

 tically admitted in a lecture delivered in 1883, that a bed 

 may be reduced to such a condition that the oyster will 

 only be able to recover its former state by a long struggle 

 with its enemies and competition in fact that it must re- 

 establish itself much in the same way as they have acquired 

 possession of new grounds in Zutland, a process which 

 according to his own statement, occupied thirty years. 



