CTPRINIDiE OE CARPS. 283 



to gleam or twinkle^ certainly belongs to these ■ shiners/ 

 who have been long mulcted of their lustrous scales for 

 the fabrication of false pearls. As our chief interest in 

 bleak is connected with this manufacture, we shall in- 

 troduce him to the reader by a few words of preliminary 

 notice in re pearl. 



Venice, long unrivalled in the artistic inventiveness 

 and ability of her glass-blowers, conceived among other 

 bright vitreous inventions, the idea of smearing the in- 

 side of clear white beads with an opaque pearly varnish ; 

 and she executed the device so admirably, and made 

 these deceptive pearls so perfect, that the Government 

 felt called upon to interfere, and formally to prohibit the 

 continuance of a craft by which the pubhc were con- 

 tinually exposed to fraudulent practices. We know not 

 whether any of these wonderful counterfeits of the six- 

 teenth century are still in existence ; if so, their antiquity 

 and connection with the history of pearl-making must 

 render them both curious and valuable. After awhile, 

 the fabrication of false pearls was taken up by a French- 

 man named Jacquia, to whom the nacrous idea first oc- 

 curred, on seeing the water in which bleak had been 

 washed charged with a cloud of minute micaceous par- 

 ticles of this sparkling lymph. He took a small quantity 

 for experiment, and, when the silvery atoms had sub- 

 sided to the bottom of the vessel, carefully decanted off 

 the water, washed the sediment clean from impurities, 

 and mixing with it a thick, viscid, and colourless fluid, 

 found himself possessed of a beautifully lustrous paste, 

 that he called ' essence of pearl;' with which he went to 

 work, and having formed gypsum beads into the various 

 rounded shapes such as are usually assumed by pearls, 

 he rolled them in the mixture tUl they were completely 

 coated over with a solid smooth crust.* 



* By a procedure analogous to this, the birboni of Naples 



