PEARLS AND PEARL-OYSTERS. 211 
decaying shellfish reign supreme. Little cause for marvel that amid these surroundings 
long residence there without change generates a most decided tendency towards the 
development of hepatic and splenetic disorders. 
The view given in the upper illustration of the Plate just quoted embodies 
everything that is essential in the equipment of a Shark’s Bay Pearling Station. 
Pearling cutters anchored in the Bay. Heaps of shell brought in by the boats and 
awaiting attention at the hands of the native boys and “belles” who are extensively 
engaged here to perform the savoury task of. detaching the half-putrid gem-bearing 
fish from their shelly tenements. To the left, on the beach, may be seen a 
number of barrels set upright, into which are consigned the abstracted shellfish, of 
which more anon. A half-windlass, half-barrel-organ sort of apparatus in the mid- 
ground is the happy inspiration of a local genius for the reception and rapid revolution 
of the roughly-cleaned shells, whereby all the brittle outer and useless margins are 
rubbed off and fall through the coarse wire-netting framework to the ground 
beneath. In the yet more immediate foreground the cleaned and bagged-up 
shells are ready for dispatch to the London market. The lower of the two 
pictures gives a nearer view of the same station from a different standpoint, in 
which the shell supplies and much of the paraphernalia above described are still 
more clearly defined. 
The pearls yielded by the Shark’s Bay shell are of a somewhat unique character. 
While a large portion of them are of the ordinary milk-white or opalescent tint, 
_a not inconsiderable percentage are a brilliant straw or golden hue. “Golden 
Pearls” from the “Golden West” represent a happy and altogether appropriate 
conjunction. Although not ranking at present in the trade so high as their colourless 
compeers, there can be no doubt that, from an esthetic standpoint, these golden 
pearls possess a richness and warmth of tint that, to many minds, is incomparably finer. 
In the upper half of Plate XXXVIII., a photographic representation is given of 
the separated valves of a Shark’s Bay shell, and in the hollow of the one to the left 
a small series of these golden pearls were temporarily deposited. Both the shell and 
pearls are in this instance represented at about three-quarters of their natural size. A yet 
finer series of this particular description of pearls derived from Shark’s Bay has been 
recently placed on view among the writer’s loan collection to the Western Australian 
Court of the Imperial Institute. 
The modus operandi of abstracting the pearls from the animal substance of the 
Shark’s Bay shells differs in a marked direction from that practised with relation to 
