Self-sown Oysters, Thames Estuary. 173 



Kentish Flats, represent nearly the last of the freely fished 

 natural beds. Even these may dimmish in supply, for they 

 are almost continuously worked on, and good spatting seasons 

 are not too many. 



FIG. 20. 



OYSTER DREDGERS AT WORK ON NATURAL BEDS IN THE NEIGHBOURHOOD 

 OF THE PONT. 



Original Painting by HENRY A. COLE, 1897. 

 Reduced from PL X., " Essex Nat.," by permission of the Editor. 



Small patches of self-sown native oysters may possibly here 

 and there exist in the Swin or the Deeps; but if known no 

 special dredging for them is carried on so far as we can learn. 

 Occasionally a living oyster or oyster shells come up in the 

 trawler's net, and the empty shells are not uncommon in the 

 neighbourhood or outside of Margate sands ; otherwise there is 

 scant evidence of the oysters nourishing (other than in the 

 cultivated beds) in its ancient haunts within the Thames 

 estuary. The fact is like what has been proved to have 

 happened in the once wonderfully productive Firth of Forth 

 oyster scalps, where depletion has run so fa.r that there is not 

 abundance enough of full-grown oysters to multiply sufficiently 

 and recuperate the destruction of spat and loss of young brood, 

 under the ordinary or the untoward conditions which frequently 

 arise.* 



* " The Past and the Present Condition of the Oyster Beds in the Firth of Forth." 

 Dr. T. Wemyss Fulton in Rep. F. B. Scot, for 1895 (sep. cop. 1890). 



