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HARD WICKE' S SCIENCE- G OSSIF. 



Philpots, however, saw that to give his book general 

 interest it would be necessary to adhere closely to his 

 original design, and make the history of the oyster 

 the main feature, so that readers at a distance would 

 not have to complain that it devoted itself to matters 

 of purely local interest. 



Before touching on the most interesting parts of 

 the book we are called upon to say that the publishers 

 — John Richardson and Son, of Friar Lane, Leicester, 

 and 6, Great Russell Street, London, W.C.— must be 

 congratulated on the excellence of the paper and the 

 printing and the singular beauty of the binding, and 

 we venture to hope that many other works will follow 

 from the same press. We shall now let the author 

 explain his purpose. "My object," he says, "in 

 preparing the present work has been to furnish the 

 reader and the general public with a clear description 

 of the subject, and to make the medicinal properties 

 and edible value of the common oyster clearer. 

 Another reason for undertaking this work has been 

 the want of a text-book for the student of zoology, 

 which should, at the same time, be a book of 

 reference for the general reader, and this I claim 

 mine to be." The affection — we cannot use any 

 milder term — which Dr. Philpots feels for the oyster 

 has been shared by others before him. 



Sallust seems to have had a very high opinion of 

 the oyster, and a very low one of the ancient 

 inhabitants of our country, for he says : " The poor 

 Britons — there is some good in them after all — they 

 produce an oyster." Pliny has given us some 

 valuable information respecting these favourite 

 bivalves, from which it is obvious that the modern 

 method of oyster-culture was followed by the 

 Romans as early as the time of Licinius Crassus, 

 the orator. His remarks are valuable: "The first 

 person who formed artificial oyster-beds {ostrearum 

 vivaria), was Sergius Orata, who established them at 

 Baiae, in the time of Licinius Crassus, the orator, 

 just before the Marsic war (circa B.C. 95). 



But the oyster had its detractors among the 

 ancients as well as among ourselves. Seneca, who 

 left boundless wealth, after pathetically singing the 

 praises of poverty ; Seneca the wise and moderate, 

 who ate several hundred oysters every week, thus 

 launches forth against many good things, and the 

 mud-fattened mollusc amongst them : — " Dii boni, 

 quantum hominem unus venter exercet ! Quid ? tu 

 illos boletos, voluptarium venenum, nihil occulti 

 operis judicas facere, etiamsi praesentanei non 

 furant ? Quid ? tu illam rcstivam nivem non putas 

 callum jecinoribus obducere ? Quid ? ilia ostrea, 

 inertissimam carnem, cceno saginatam, nihil exist- 

 imas limosse gravitatis inferre ? " The first sentence 

 has been happily and literally rendered by a learned 

 Dorset rector— " How one belly bothers a fellow." 

 In another letter Seneca says that, "having listened 

 to Attilus declaiming against vice and folly, he for 

 ever renounced oysters and mushrooms, for such 



things could not properly be called food, and were 

 mere provocatives of the appetite, causing those who 

 were already full to eat the more, no doubt a thing 

 very pleasant to gluttons, who like to stuff themselves 

 with such food as very readily slides down and very 

 readily returns." The last sentence is in allusion to 

 the filthy habit of the Roman epicures in artificially 

 emptying the stomach with the help of emetics. 



Whether it was the small size and delicate flavour 

 of British_oysters which first brought them into high 

 favour at Rome we cannot tell, though gourmets 

 still assert that our Natives have not their equals 

 anywhere else. Some larger sorts are nevertheless 

 excellent, and the curious reader will find accounts of 

 giants of which one is sufficient for a full meal ; we 

 can ourselves recall with much inward satisfaction a 

 visit we once paid to an oyster saloon at Richmond, 

 in Virginia, where we were compelled to feast on a 

 large number of monsters, every one of which would 

 have turned the scale against half a dozen Natives ; 

 but in spite of their large size the Americans seemed 

 to us equal to the very best we had tasted elsewhere. 



We cannot do better than introduce here a charm- 

 ing passage almost verbatim ; from it the reader will 

 be the better able to judge of our author's style. 



" In the days when luxury was rampant, and men 

 of great wealth, like Licinius Crassus, the leviathan 

 slave merchant, rose to the highest honours, this 

 dealer in human flesh, in the boasted land of liberty, 

 served the office of consul, with Pompey the Great 

 as his colleague, and on one occasion required 10,000 

 tables to accommodate all his guests. How many 

 barrels of oysters were eaten at that celebrated 

 dinner the ' Ephemerides ' — as Plutarch calls ' The 

 Times ' and ' Morning Post ' of his day— have 

 omitted to state ; but as oysters then took the place 

 that turtle-soup now does at our great City banquets, 

 the imagination may busy itself, if it likes, with the 

 calculation. All we know is, that oysters then 

 fetched very high prices at Rome,, as the author of 

 the ' Tabella Cibaria ' has not failed to tell us ; and 

 then, as now, the high price of any luxury was sure 

 to make a liberal supply necessary, when a man like 

 Crassus, to strengthen his popularity, entertained 

 half the city as his guests. Pliny mentions that, 

 according to the historians of Alexander's expedition, 

 oysters were found in the Indian Sea a foot in 

 diameter, and Sir James E. Tennent unexpectedly 

 corroborated the correctness of this statement, as at 

 Kottiar, near Trincomalee, enormous specimens of 

 edible oysters were brought to the rest house ; one 

 shell measured more than eleven inches in length by 

 half as many in width. But this extraordinary 

 measurement is beaten by the oysters of Port 

 Lincoln, in South Australia, which are the largest 

 edible ones in the world. They are as large as a 

 dinner plate, and with much the same shape. They 

 are sometimes more than a foot across the shell, and 

 the oyster fits his habitation so well that he does not 



