360 The Commercial Products of the Sea, 



the exception of tortoiseshell and ivory. In China and 

 Japan very beautiful cups and saucers are made from 

 this material, little fancy boxes, cases for holding chop- 

 sticks, and such like. The artistic mode of lacquering, 

 gilding, and ornamenting the tortoiseshell salvers, cups, 

 and boxes, as practised in Japan, has yet to be acquired 

 here. 



The Chinese are partial to tortoiseshell, but then they 

 have peculiar notions respecting it. Tortoiseshell having 

 white and dark spots that touch each other, and is as much 

 as possible similar on both sides of the plate, is in their 

 eyes much finer, and on this account more eagerly bought 

 by them, than shell that wants this peculiarity. On the 

 contrary, plates which are reddish rather than black in 

 their dark spots, which possess little white, and are more 

 damasked than spotted — in a word, in which the colours, 

 according to the Chinese taste, are badly distributed — are 

 less valued. This, caprice of the Chinese makes them 

 sometimes value single " heads " at unheard-of prices ; 

 such, for example, as go under the name of " white 

 heads," and for the varieties of which they have peculiar 

 names. 



Tortoiseshell was much used to decorate furniture by 

 the Romans. According to Pliny, Carvillius Pollio was 

 the first to apply tortoiseshell to ornamental purposes,. 

 The fashion for this style of decoration increased, and in 

 the days of Augustus the patricians ornamented their 

 doors and the columns of their rooms with this substance. 

 Julius Caesar found in Alexandria such a collection of the 

 carapaces of the tortoise that he had them carried in his 

 triumphal entry. 



Strabo, Diodorus, and Pliny, all speak of boats made 

 from the shells of tortoises. They are authors of un- 



