and of a bright, lively lustre. The tint may 

 range from a satiny white through all the 

 shades of the primary colors to the darkest 

 purple, green, red or blue but the lustre 

 should be clean, clear and brilliant. Such 

 pearls are rarely found except among those 

 from the pearl oyster and the mussels of 

 the Mississippi river and its tributaries. 



Fallacies 



How often one reads in the newspapers 

 a sensational story of how Mrs. Blank, while 

 eating an oyster stew, bit onto something 

 hard and found to her astonishment that she 

 was the possessor of a wonderful pearl which 

 the local jeweler pronounced as valuable. 

 This story is sometimes varied by the state- 

 ment that the lustre of the pearl had been 

 destroyed by cooking. If the "pearl" Mrs. 

 Blank found had been what she supposed, 

 the cooking would not have injured it, and 

 if taken from an oyster, would have been 

 worth no more than a gravel stone of the 

 same size. The concretions of limey matter 

 found in the edible oyster are never valu- 

 able for the reason that pearls are similar 

 in lustre to the shells in which they grow 

 and as the interior of the oyster is of a dull, 

 grayish white and never pearly, the nodules 

 of lime found in it are the same. True 

 pearls are found only in shells which are 

 nacreous or pearly. 



One reads too, of pearls becoming sick 



