368 OYSTERS, AND ALL ABOUT THEM. 



entertained tolerantly, and living there under some sort of 

 unwritten letters of naturalisation. 



The new museum, only occupying at present the 

 ground floor of a house in Whitstable's one street, has 

 been justly praised as a practical aid to local improvement. 



Beholden for its foundation to the banker of the town, 

 Mr. Sibert Saunders, an enthusiastic archaeologist and 

 student of natural history, it contains within a small com- 

 pass much to inform the observant eye and retentive mind 

 concerning the various phenomena of the surrounding 

 neighbourhood. '.Infinite riches in a little room' is a 

 golden legend, as fitting for a select gathering of instructive 

 objects, that is to say, a carefully and intelligently formed 

 museum not a crowded and confused assembly of irrele- 

 vant oddities as for a library. 



The mere addition of a working microscope has in a 

 few weeks taught the Whitstable dredgers a great deal 

 more about the oyster than the oldest and most experienced 

 among them ever knew before ; the knowledge thus newly 

 imparted being by no means of the uselessly curious order. 

 They are now fully acquainted with the nature of what 

 they have been calling spat, with but the haziest ideas of 

 its energetic life and impulse. Only a short time ago they 

 fancied the turbid fluid, with minute granulations, became 

 hardened on the surface of the water, till it deposited itself 

 in fragments which gradually form themselves into oysters. 



Not alone to dredgers, but to many a man of so-called 

 education, the early microscopic existence of the oyster is 

 a novelty and a marvel. Each speck in the multitude of 

 seemingly inorganic particles, clouding a drop of this fluid, 

 is seen, under the lens, to be an active little creature, 

 . and when the oyster-fisher is told, upon evi- 

 dence which he can have no great difficulty in accepting. 



e 



