54- OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



is some curious information concerning the manners and 

 trade of our ancestors. In one colloquy the fisherman is 

 asked, " What do you take in the sea?" " Herrings and 

 salmons, porpoises, sturgeons, oysters and crabs, mussels, 

 winkles, cockles, flounders, plaice, lobsters, and such 

 like." 



Necklaces of oyster-shells, limpets, and other shells, 

 strung together on fibre or sinews, have been and are 

 found in early British and Saxon graves, (b) 



From the fourth century, to which Macrobius brought 



J ' o 



us, to the reign of Louis IV., of France, the history of the 

 oyster is a blank ; but that king revived the taste for our 

 favourite, and during his captivity in Normandy brought it 

 again into request with his conqueror, Duke William ; so, 

 when the Normans invaded England under William the 

 Conqueror the descendant of that Duke William, little 



(b) In Britten's " History of Dorset," mention is made of the 

 finding of a small urn in a barrow in the parish of Lul worth, about two 

 inches high, and one inch in diameter, neatly covered with the shell of 

 a limpet ; but it was quite empty. 



Beads made from the columella of Stronibus pi pas are found in 



O O 



sepulchral remains in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Indiana. So we are 

 told by Dr. Daniel Wilson, in his " Prehistoric Remains," while the 

 author of " Flint Chips" tells us that the shells of the Dentalium 

 made into beads, have been met with in tumuli in Ohio. And Mr. T. 

 J. Pettigrew, F.R.S., author of " A History of Egyptian Mummies," 

 states that in Egypt, on the mummies of children, necklaces of natural 

 shells, or shells figured in gold, silver, precious stones, &c., are found 

 chiefly, according to Passalacqua, met with on those of young girls. 

 Finally, as a further illustration of this custom of the ancients still in 

 vogue amongst barbarous nations, Mr. V. Ball, in his " Jungle Life in 

 India," informs us that the women of the Andaman Islands wear 

 various ornaments, and the most extraordinary are the skulls of their 

 defunct relatives festooned with strings of shells, which some of them 

 carry suspended from their necks. 



