130 THE SEA. 



would otherwise have washed away to sea with the tide, and been lost. " At the present 

 time these lines of hurdles form a perfect little forest at Aiguillon ; there are 

 about a quarter of a million piles alone. In July the bouchotiers, as the men employed 

 in this culture are termed, launch their punts, and proceeding to the marshes, detach with 

 a hook the thickly agglomerated masses of young mussels from the piles, which they gather 

 in baskets and take to the bouchots, which form a perfect hedge of fascines and branches, 

 of different heights. Each stage receives the mollusc suitable to it. In the first 

 stage of its existence the mussel cannot endure exposure to the air, and remains con- 

 stantly under water, except at the period of spring tides. These are gathered in sacks 

 made of old matting, or suspended in interstices of the basket-work. The mussels are 

 advanced stage after stage until they reach the highest bouchots, which remain out of 

 water at all tides. " The whole bay yielded close on half a million pounds sterling some 

 years ago. 



"While," says Figuier, "commending the mussel as an important article of food, 

 we must not conceal the fact that it has produced in certain persons very grave effects, 

 showing that for them its flesh has the effects of poison. The symptoms, commonly 

 observed two or three hours after the repast, are weakness or torpor, constriction of the 

 throat and swelling of the head, accompanied by great thirst, nausea, frequent vomit- 

 ings, and eruptions of the skin and severe itching. 



" The cause of these attacks is not very well ascertained ; they have in turn been 

 ascribed to the presence of the coppery pyrites in the neighbourhood of the mussel ; to certain 

 small crabs which lodge themselves as parasites in the shell of the mussel ; to the 

 spawn of star-fish or medusae that the mussel may have swallowed. But, probably the true 

 cause of this kind of poisoning is found in the predisposition of individuals. The remedy is 

 very simple ; an emetic, accompanied by drinking plentifully of slightly acidulated beverage/' 

 They are eaten very freely in most parts of the seaboard of the United States, and the 

 present writer has eaten them constantly, boiled, stewed with tomatoes, &c., and in soup, 

 without the slightest bad effects. 



The bivalve par excellence must always be Ostrea erf nils, the common oyster. This 

 mollusc, which some might be inclined to place low in the scale of nature, has really a 

 complex and delicate organisation. It has a mouth, heart, stomach, liver, and intestines; 

 its blood is colourless, but it has a true circulation; and it breathes under water, as do 

 fishes. " Having no head," says Figuier, " the oyster can have no brain ; the nerves 

 originate near the mouth, where a great ganglion is visible, whence issue a pair of nerves 

 which distribute themselves in the regions of the stomach and liver, terminating in a second 

 ganglion, situated behind the liver. The first nervous branch distributes its sensibility to 

 the mouth and tentacles ; the second, to the respiratory branchia?. With organs of the 

 senses oysters are unprovided. Condemned to a sedentary life, riveted to a rock, where they 

 have been rooted, as it were, in their infancy, they neither see nor hear ; touch appears to 

 be their only sense, and that is placed in the labial tentacles of the mouth." The oyster 

 may carry hundreds of thousands of eggs some say as many as 2,000,000 ; it ejects them 

 after a process of incubation. Nothing is more curious than to witness a bank of oysters 

 in the spawning season, which is usually from the month of June to the end of Septem- 



