376 ' THE OCEAN WOULD. 



oyster culture, his contemporaries said of him, in allusion to the 

 hanging banks which he invented, that if he had been prevented from 

 raising oysters in the Lucrin Lake, "he would have made them 

 grow on .the house-tops." The traveller who visits this celebrated 

 lake finds only a miry puddle. The precious oysters placed there by 

 Catiline's grandfather are replaced by a host of miserable eels, which 

 leap in the mud; vile mountains of ashes, coal, and pumice-stone, 

 which was thrown up in a night like the mushroom, having reduced 

 the once celebrated lake into the state described. 



Rondeletius also speaks of a fisherman who understood the art of 

 oyster culture. 



The Neapolitan Lake Fusaro the terrible Acheron of the poets is 

 a great oyster-park, in which Art is made effectually to aid Nature in 

 the multiplication of its products. This famous oyster-bank, which 

 is represented in PL. XIII., lies in the neighbourhood of Baia and 

 Cumse. It forms one of the most interesting spots in that beautiful 

 bay. In the month of February, 1865, M. Figuier tells us he 

 traversed its celebrated coast, seated himself on the banks of the 

 historical lake, and tasted the produce of this curious manufacture of 

 living beings, whose origin dates from the Roman period. 



Lake Fusaro was in ancient times a place of evil report : Virgil 

 immortalized it as the mythological Acheron ; but its landscape had 

 nothing of the sadness and desolation which accords with the sojourn 

 of the dead. It is a salt pond, shaded with a girdle of magnificent 

 trees. It is about a league in circumference, and about a fathom in 

 depth at its deepest part ; its bottom is muddy and black, like the rest 

 of this volcanic region. 



It will be understood, from what has been said, that the chief 

 obstacle to the reproduction of oysters is the absence of any solid 

 body to which the young spawn can attach itself, and the means of 

 shelter from animals which prey upon them. The fishermen living on 

 the shores of Lake Fusaro have long realized this, and provided 

 against it by warehousing, as it were, in the lake near the sea, the 

 oysters ready to discharge their spawn, while retaining the young 

 generations captive in the protected basins, where they are sheltered 

 from various causes of destruction to which oysters are exposed in the 

 open sea. 



Upon the bottom of the lake, and on its circumference, the proprie- 



