OYSTER CULTURE IN FRANCE. 499 



Hundreds of beautiful little shells there were in these 

 double sieves, and there they will remain, fattening and 

 growing with the inflow and the outflow of the sea, that 

 brings them food every twelve hours, thrusting it between 

 their prison bars, and certain to come again with more 

 next day. There they will stay until they have grown to 

 be two inches across the shell, or perhaps a little less, and 

 then they will be placed out in the enclosures, defended by 

 the palisades of saplings. Behind the saplings we found 

 that fairly substantial dykes had been constructed by means 

 of strong stakes driven into the sand, with about z feet 

 left above the sand bank. Boards had been placed along 

 these in some places, and sand pressed in between this 

 wall and another similar to it about four feet away. Again 

 the dykes had often been constructed of mere fascines, or 

 'bundles of the long heather found in the forests. These 

 allow a certain amount of the tidal water to flow through 

 them, but they arrest the motion of any moving sand, and 

 soon get wedged and jammed and heavy with the particles, 

 so that they constitute a most efficient dam. These dykes 

 are arranged in squares and parallelograms. The floor 

 within is clean, and full of fairly matured oysters spread 

 abroad upon the surface. 



. . . . And soon we shoved off again, and floated 

 up a narrow channel, .... A perfect network of 

 dykes, enclosing square pools of water, was here formed 

 on the sands. The water must be always sufficiently deep 

 to prevent the fish from feeling the effects of frost in winter 

 or being parboiled by the summer heats. Then it is not so 

 easy a matter to make the enclosures. The dykes have to 

 be always watched lest a breach be made, and although 

 the elasticity of the heather fascines make it more difficult 

 for the waves to make gaps, yet these occur and have to be 



