58 
being poor and saltish in taste. Possibly these may have 
been grown from spat derived from embryos which have 
been drifted up on some occasion from Arcachon. 
MARENNES, &C. 
The flat district on both sides of the estuary of the 
Seudre is the chief region for fattening up the oysters and 
preparing them for market, and it is in this neighbourhood 
that the celebrated green oysters, so well known and 
highly prized in some markets, are produced. But it 
must not be thought that all the oysters reared in these 
claires are green, the two kinds (‘‘huitres vertes” and 
‘‘huitres blanches’’) are cultivated in the same neigh- 
bourhood. 
La Tremblade is on the southern side of the Seudre a 
few miles from the estuary, and its port is La Gréve. A 
wide canal, up which small coasting vessels and fishing 
boats can sail, leads the sea-water from La Greve to 
Tremblade and supplies the numerous oyster ‘ claires”’ 
in the district around. The country is very flat and the 
soilis clayorclayand marl. Itis excavated in all directions 
for miles to form claires and the branch canals supplying 
them. The ‘‘claires’’ (Pl. II, fig. 4) are merely shallow 
artificial ponds of more or less rectangular form and about 
2 feet deep on an average. The floor is simply the clayey 
soil and is very muddy, while the sides are turf banks 
pierced somewhere by a pipe leading from a branch canal 
or a neighbouring claire. On the north of the estuary in 
the neighbourhood of the little town of Marennes there are 
also numbers of claires supplied by a canal leading inland. 
A good deal of the low-lying land is also occupied by salt 
marshes (marais salants), shallow excavations in which 
the sea-water is evaporated and from which the salt is 
scraped up in heaps by great wooden rakes. The pyramids 
