o12 SUPPLEMENT 
half crown piece ; and at the end ofa year, as large as a dollar. 
The fishermen on the coast just mentioned, distinguish the 
age of the oysters by the strie of the shell. When they ap- 
proach the term of their growth, the shell is very large in 
proportion to the animal, which grows thin, and diminishes 
more and more. As the oysters can completely shut their 
shell, and thus enclose a large quantity of water in their in- 
terior, they can live a sufficiently long time out of this fluid, 
especially if the drying action of the air on their testa be pre- 
vented, and they be placed in their natural position. ‘This 
faculty, which allows of their being transported to consider- 
able distances, facilitates the extensive commerce to which 
they give rise. 
The oysters which never cause us any injury, except it 
may be in occasionally contracting or diminishing the depth 
of a bay, are of very considerable utility, inasmuch as from 
time immemorial they have constituted the food of man, 
fresh, dried, or cooked, but particularly in their fresh state. 
The Greeks, and more especially the Romans, when they 
levied contributions upon land and sea, throughout the then 
known world, to cover the table of a Lucullus, or an Apicius, 
held them in very high estimation, and attached no small 
importance to the localities from which they were imported. 
Those of the Dardanelles, of Venice, of the bay of Cumez, and 
of England, were those which they preferred ; but they espe- 
cially attached a very great value to those which, brought 
from these different places, and perhaps from places still 
more remote, were transported in large boats (lacubus ligneis) 
and deposited in the Lucrine lake, where they grew remark- 
ably fat. The first Roman who entertained the notion of 
establishing this sort of park, or oyster-bed, was Sergius 
Orata, at Baie, in the time of the Marsian war. It appears 
that the Romans preferred those oysters which have the 
edges of the mouth a deep brown, almost black, and that they 
