OYSTERS. 375 



sides of the Channel were ploughed up by the oyster dredger pretty 

 much as the ploughman on shore turns up a field. The consequence 

 was that, twenty years ago, the French beds were totally exhausted, 

 and France had to look to foreign countries for its oyster. Oyster 

 farms which had employed fourteen hundred men and two hundred 

 boats were reduced to two hundred men and twenty boats. Similar 

 results from over-dredging would have followed, no doubt, on this side 

 the Channel had the mollusc not been protected by the company and 

 private proprietors who held the oyster-beds in the large estuaries. 

 This state of things in France led to some important discoveries in 



Fig. 172. Dredge employed in Oyster fisheries. 



the science of oyster culture, which have produced important changes 

 there. 



The name of Sergius Grata has already been mentioned as a culti- 

 vator of oysters. He lived in the fifth century before our era, and 

 according to Pliny he first attempted parking oysters at Baia in the 

 times of the orator Lucius Crassus. He was the first to recognise the 

 superior flavour of the oysters of the Lucrin Lake, the Avernus of the 

 poets, probably for trade reasons of his own, for then, as now, Eeveille- 

 Parise remarks, writing on the subject, " tradesmen speculated on the 

 weaknesses of human gourmandism." But Sergius really created a 

 new industry, which is still practised in thousands of places much as 

 he left it. As a proof of the perfection to which Sergius had brought 



