NOVEMUKR, 1012. 



KNOWLEDGE. 



423 



in a sheltered bay. and the young collected. The 

 objection to this proposal is the impossibility, in 

 almost every case, of securing that the spat, which 

 passes through a fairly long plankton stage in waters 

 where there is often a strong tidal current, will 

 return to the neighbourhood of the parent shells to 

 attach itself. 



I must here mention a matter which is regrettable. 

 It is an instance where a regulation has apparently 

 been based upon a scientific theor\- which is 

 probably erroneous, and consequently the regulation 

 instead of being beneficial is, if anything, harmful. 

 In the '' Rules for Lower Burma, under the Burma 

 Fisheries Act, 1905," Sections 64 and 67, the taking 

 of the oyster-eating fishes, Balistes and Trygoii in 

 the pearl fishery districts was prohibited, and 

 fishermen were required, if thev caught these fishes 

 accidentally, to return them to the sea. These 

 rules were issued in .\ugust, 1907, just after the 

 above-mentioned report was published. They have 

 since been repealed. It is only fair to the authors 

 to say that the recommendation that such a 

 regulation should be framed is not contained in 

 their report ; indeed, it is difficult to imagine how 

 and bv whoTii such a recommendation could have 

 been made. .\t that time these fishes were supposed 

 to harbour the intermediate and adult stages of a 

 worm which was supposed to cause the formation of 

 pearls in the Ceylon pearl oyster, Mari^urififcra 

 viilf^cJris, but I do not think there was any evidence 

 that the same parasite occurred in the widely 

 different Mergui mother-of-pearl shell, Marf^aritifera 

 maxima. And my subsequent researches have 

 shown that, apart from this rash analogy, the idea 

 that this worm causes pearls even in the Ceylon 

 oyster is highly doubtful. The regulation thus had 

 the effect of protecting what are probably two of the 

 worst enemies of the oyster. 



Mr. John I. Solomon, who is not a trained 

 biologist but an engineer, has formed the Burma 

 Shell Company, and started work in the Mergui 

 .\rchipelago. .Vn attempt was made by him to 

 grow mother-of-pearl oysters in a large tank on 

 the shore of an island ; but this was, as might have 

 been expected, unsuccessful. Some success has, 

 however, been achieved in producing blisters on 

 lines similar to those followed in Japan. I have 

 seen some of Mr. Solomon's products, and they 

 are the finest artificially-produced blisters that I 

 have vet met with, and I understand that he is now 

 marketing them : but whether the enterprise will 

 prove commercially successful will depend, in the 

 main, on whether it will be feasible in those waters 

 to produce these commodities at a profit when they 

 fall to a value comparable to that of the Japanese 

 article, as thev must do as soon as their nature is 

 understood. 



Red Si:a. 



For some vears Mr. Cyril Crossland has been 

 experimenting in the Red Sea for the Sudan Govern- 

 ment, studying the marine biology of its waters, with 



special reference to the three species of Margaritifera 

 that occur \\\erem,viz., M .ma r^iaritifera vnr.eryflircae, 

 .M. x'lilgaris. and the valueless .U. mauritii. So far 

 as 1 know, Mr. Crossland has not yet published an 

 account of his economic work. 



French P.vcikic. 



The question of cultivating the '' Tahiti " mother- 

 of-pearl oyster (M. margaritifera var. camiiigii) has 

 often been broached, and has been the subject of 

 several scientific missions; but without any consider- 

 able results. 



Space forbids me to deal with the several Tiiissions 

 in detail in this paper. 



C KYI. ox. 



Mv account of the scientific work done here in the 

 last dozen years will be very brief, as I have already 

 dealt with it recently in two papers {Journal of 

 Economic Biology, F'ebruary, 1912, pages 10-22, and 

 Proceed ini^s of the Zoological Socictv. 1912, pages 

 260-358, plates .\.\XIII, .\L\IIi. 



The historv of the enterprise is briefiy as follows. 

 In 1900, the Ceylon Government, an.xious to devise 

 measures for preventing the frequent occurrence of 

 barren years or periods of years, approached the 

 Council of the Royal Society and Professor (now 

 Sir) Ra\- Lankester, with a view to obtaining 

 scientific advice. As a result. Professor Herdnian 

 was sent on a mission to Ceylon, and left behind 

 him, after a couple of month's work on the spot, an 

 assistant to carry on the work initiated by him. 

 Later on the work started by the Government was 

 taken over by the Ceylon Company of Pearl F'ishers, 

 Ltd., a compan\' formed largeh' to give effect to the 

 recommendations made as a result of this mission. 

 The capital of the Company was £165,000, and Sir 

 West Ridgeway, who was Governor of Ce\lon when 

 the mission was undertaken, became chairman of the 

 Company. Professor Herdman was retained as 

 scientific adviser to the Company. Briefly sum- 

 marised the position may be stated as follows : — The 

 two remedies recommended as a result of the scientific 

 mission, viz., cultching and transplantation, have 

 so far failed in practice, and the Company is 

 now in liquidation. Moreover, as I have shown 

 elsewhere, the most important scientific discovery 

 claimed, that is to say, the Cestode origin of pearls, 

 is probabh- a mistake. Extensive faunistic data were 

 collected ; but the relation of some of these to the 

 main question is far from obvious. 



A speech made by Sir West Ridgeway, on October 

 27th, 1900, after a paper by the late Mr. Oliver 

 Collett, on Pearl Oysters, read before the Colombo 

 Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society and reported in 

 The Ceylon Observer for October 29th, suggested 

 that Sir Ray Lankester saw, in Ceylon's need for 

 scientific guidance, an opportunity for " enriching the 

 scientific world at the cost of Ceylon "' : a charge 

 which is all the more unfortunate because probably 

 a more intensive study of the pearl oyster itself, and 

 of pearl production, would have yielded more 



