PEARLS AND PEARL-OYSTERS. 203 
pearl-shells and other indigenous products lent by the writer to the Western 
Australian Court of the Imperial Institute, those specially interested in such /usi 
nature are afforded an opportunity of examining and deciding for themselves as to 
the most manifest resemblances of this infant prodigy. 
Included in the collection above referred to are several pearls of fantastic shape, 
some of them, notably, resembling the bodies of spiders and various insects. One of 
these practically double pearls is photographically reproduced to a scale of a little 
less than one half of its natural size in the lower figure on page 202, which represents 
it as it was originally exposed to view, embedded in the living tissues of the pearl- 
oyster. This specimen is the more interesting since it likewise reveals the presence 
of one of the little commensal Pea-crabs, Pinnotheres, already referred to as not 
unfrequently occurring in this bivalve. Another little crustacean ‘commensal ”— so- 
called to distinguish it from a predaceous parasite, it being dependent upon its host 
only for comfortable lodgings—takes the form of a tiny lobster of a transparent hue, 
sprinkled with red. This species, which is known to science by the title of Alpheus 
avarus, is more plentifully met with in the Mother-of-Pearl shells on the Queensland 
coast and is figured in Plate XIV. of the writer’s book descriptive of the fish and 
fisheries of the Great Barrier Reef. 
As attested to on a previous page, not many years since—Pearl-shelling on the 
Western Australian coast, having commenced in the year 1868—shell was to be 
obtained in quantities by simply wading and gathering it from the inshore reefs. 
These were the happy times when the Pearl-sheller could rapidly make his pile, 
effecting a grand coup perhaps in a single day by the purchase of a pickle bottle 
full of pearls from the unsophisticated natives for no more substantial a consideration 
than a pound of bad tobacco. Times have changed since then, the former inshore 
reefs have been stripped clean, and it is with much toil, trouble and a frequent loss 
of human life that profitable returns are filched from the deeper water from which the 
shell is now alone to be obtained in abundance. 
Within a measurable distance of time it will probably come about that the 
banks at present workable will become exhausted, and the goose with its golden eggs, 
like the oyster industry in some of the South Australian colonies, will be well-nigh, if 
not absolutely, done to death. The one remedial measure for this untoward condition 
of affairs is undoubtedly that of artificial cultivation. This expedient may not perhaps 
recommend itself to the generality of the reapers of to-day, to whom the outlook for 
the harvesters of the morrow is a matter of supreme indifference. The waste involved 
