246 VALUE OF THE OYSTER. 



The oyster, as food, is wholesome, light, and easily 

 digested. An eminent French writer has characterized 

 it as pre-eminently adapted for dyspeptics, from its pecu- 

 liar success in nourishing and healing a feeble or irritated 

 stomach. Persons may eat considerable quantities, and 

 not only not suffer any inconvenient effects, but enjoy 

 their dinner afterwards, as if their appetite had been 

 positively stimulated by the introductory repast. We 

 have not met, however, with any modern oyster-eater 

 worthy of being compared with Yitellius, who ate four 

 meals a day, and devoured at each meal, it is said, twelve 

 hundred oysters ! Certainly, in the annals of modern 

 gastronomy a Doctor Gastaldi is celebrated for his daily 

 absorption of thirty to forty dozen ; but the interval be- 

 tween the Italian physician and the Roman emperor is 

 very wide indeed. 



Oysters begin to sicken about the end of April, and 

 during the hot months are engaged in depositing their 

 spawn. 



They do not leave their ova, as is the case with many 

 marine creatures, to be hatched independently ; but pro- 

 tect them for several weeks between the folds of their 

 mantle and the laminae of their lungs. Here they remain 

 surrounded by a mucous matter which assists their 

 development ; this matter, with its accumulated ova, 

 gradually losing its fluidity, and changing successively to 

 a light shade of yellow, gray, brown, and violet ; the last- 

 named indicating that the embryonic condition of the ova 

 is nearly at an end. Then comes the happy moment of 

 release ; and nothing, says a French authority, is more 

 curious than the spectacle of a bank of oysters at the 



