PEARLS AND PEARL-OYSTERS. 199 



pearly substance, which, when symmetrically shaped and suitably mounted, are only 

 distinguishable by the initiated from solid pearls. Pearls themselves often grow 

 attached to the surface of the shell, and in course of time become enclosed by and 

 buried within its matrix ; these immersed pearls can be disengaged and trimmed or 

 "faked" into perfect shape. Samples of such immersed pearls are conspicuous 

 towards the left-hand corner of the Plate. In common with the " blisters " they are 

 in the first place punched free from their shelly matrix, and in that rough form 

 consigned to the hands of the expert. 



A few choice pearls of more exceptional size and quality placed by Mr. Streeter 

 at the writer's disposal for photographic delineation have been reproduced in the form 

 of a tail-piece illustration to this Chapter. 



The amount of pearls produced by any given weight of shell is an altogether 

 problematic quantity, incapable of even approximate determination. There are, at the 

 same time, grounds upon which the shell produces pearls in phenomenal abundance, 

 such shell, however, being invariably of inferior quality. Pearls, in fact, as is 

 tolerably well known, represent a diseased product of the mollusc. It might, indeed, 

 be suggested that they partake somewhat of the nature of chalk-stones in the human 

 subject. Were puns permissible, we might add the moral " Chacun a son gout "- 

 not even excepting oysters. Although the best quality of Pearl-shell produces com- 

 paratively few pearls, those obtained from it are of the finest shape and lustre. As 

 an illustration of phenomenal pearl production, it may be mentioned that when he was 

 last travelling up the Western Australian coast about two years ago, the discovery 

 was announced to the writer of a new bank of shell that had been made off the 

 coast near Onslow in the Ashburton district. The shell proved to be of a very 

 diseased and inferior description, but from a few tons' weight of it pearls to the 

 value of no less than 10,000 were secured by one company. 



Pearls may assume the most fantastic shapes. The two specimens photo- 

 graphed in Plates XXXIII. and XXXIV., obtained from Western Australian 

 waters, are probably the most remarkable examples that have been hitherto dis- 

 covered. The one portrayed in the former of these two Plates is the world-celebrated 

 " Southern Cross." In place of representing, as might be reasonably supposed, an 

 artificially arranged congeries of pearls of approximately equal form and size, it 

 constitutes a natural cross-shaped group, firmly united to one another by their 

 lateral surfaces, and in the precise relationship in which they were discovered on 

 opening a shell collected during the fishery off the coast near Cossack in the year 



