{5] OYSTER AND MUSSEL INDUSTRIES. 823 
fagots, from which all the oysters considered marketable are taken suc- 
cessively, and after having picked the fruits of these artificial clusters, 
the apparatus is replaced, to remain until a new generation has arrived 
at maturity. At other times, without touching the stakes, they simply 
detach the oysters by means of a hook with many*prongs. The source 
from which these generations are derived therefore remains permanent, 
perpetuating and renewing itself constantly by the annual addition of 
a small minority which never desert their place of birth. 
The produets of the collecting, heaped up in wicker baskets of a 
spherical form and with large meshes, are provisionally deposited, while 
awaiting sale, in a reserve or park established in the same lake by the 
side of the royal pavilion, and constructed of piles, which support a 
platform of open work furnished with hooks to which the baskets are 
suspended. 
I said at the commencement of this work that the industry of Lake 
Fusaro was known to the ancients, and that probably Sergius Orata 
was the inventor; there are two historical monuments which prove that 
it began, probably, in the time of Augustus, or, as Pliny says, at the 
time of the orator Crassus, before the war of the Marses. These mon- 
uments consist of two funereal vases of glass, discovered, the one in 
Pouille, the other in. the environs of Rome. They have the shape of 
antique bottles, with large bodies and long necks, and are covered on 
the outside with designs in perspective, in which, notwithstanding their 
crude representation, we recognize fish ponds adjoining edifices, and 
communicating with the sea by areades. However, if. we should enter- 
tain doubts of their purpose and meaning, the inscription which accom- 
panies them would fully explain their character. We read upon the 
vase from Apulia, illustrated by Sestina: *STAGNUM PALATIUM (a 
name sometimes given to a villa upon the banks of Lake Lucrin, owned 
by Nero), and lower down: OSTREARIA. The other vase, which is 
preserved in the Borgia Museum at Rome (at the present time that 
of the Propaganda), and of which M. G. B. de Rossi has given an excel- 
lent interpretation,t bears the following words, written under the objects 
designed: StAGNUM NERONIS, OSTREARIA, STAGNUM, SYLVA, BAtA, 
which plainly shows that the figures have been drawn from edifices, and 
from places of the famous shore of Baia and Pozzuolo. 
What is most striking in the view of the fish-ponds represented upon 
these funereal vases is the disposition of the stakes crossing one another 
in divers directions, and arranged in circles, stakes which were evidently 
there only to receive and protect the progeny of the oysters. 
The industry of Lake Fusaro is simply a practice invented by the 
ancient Romans, and continued by their descendants, and which for 
Sergius Orata, lwruriorum magister, as Cicerot called him, was the source 
* Tllustrazioni di un vaso antico di vetro trovato presso P: Splenic Troan 1812. 
t Topografia delle Spiagge di Baia, graffita sopra due vasi di vetro. Bullet. Arch. na- 
politano, nova serie, anno primo, Napoli, 1853, p. 133, tab. 1x 
t De fin., 1. ii. 
