254 THE WEALTH OF THE SEA 



ported to the Orient. For the American trade, only 

 the foot muscle is minced and packed in cans, but 

 the abalones packed for export to the Orient con- 

 tain both the mantle and the foot muscle. 



Sea Mussels 



Curiously, while oysters, clams, scallops, and 

 abalones have been so generally exploited that the 

 important beds have been seriously threatened with 

 entire depletion, the enormous beds, of sea mussels 

 widely distributed along the coast of North America 

 have scarcely been touched. Some are sold in New 

 York, San Francisco, and Seattle, but they have 

 never come into general use as food. 



In Europe, however, the demand for mussels for 

 food and bait is so great that the natural supply 

 cannot meet it; for this reason, much attention has 

 been given to mussel culture. France alone produces 

 about four hundred million pounds of mussels. 



The invention of the system of mussel culture now 

 practised by the French dates from the thirteenth 

 century, when an Irishman named Patrick Walton 

 was shipwrecked on the French coast. Fortunately he 

 decided to make his home where he was stranded. 

 With inventive genius that would be a credit to a 

 Yankee, Walton immediately sought ways of in- 

 creasing the food supply of the region. His first 

 invention was the "alluret," a large net, a quarter 

 of a mile long and ten feet wide, for catching birds. 

 Walton noticed that young mussels attached them- 

 selves to the stakes of the bird traps in great num- 

 bers. These mussels grew more rapidly and were 



