CYPEINID^ OR CAEPS. 287 



about their heads and persons should despise them, and 

 that no woman above an inferior bourgeoise dare show 

 herself at Rome decked in such inexpensive finery. 



The ancients knew nothing of procuring pearls from 

 argentine swim-bladders or bleak scales, but they cer- 

 tainly had an equivalent ; for Chares of Mitylene speaks 

 of a fish in the Indian seas, oblong in shape, Hke a pearl 

 oyster, and of an agreeable smell, whose bones (called 

 perri) furnished ornaments for the ear, and arm and ankle 

 rings ; and was more prized by the Medes, Persians, and 

 Asiatics generally, than even gold itself. 



Besides fabricated pearls, which are entirely a modern 

 invention (minus the raw material furnished by fish) , a 

 singular practice is adopted in certain countries, of for- 

 cing various bivalves to make these valuables to order. 

 ' The Chinese,' says Beckmann, ' at the beginning of 

 summer, when 'mussels repair to the surface and open 

 their shells, take five or six small beads attached to a 

 string, and place them within the opening; at the end 

 of a year they re-examine them, and by this time com- 

 monly find the whole deposit thickly invested with the 

 nacrous secretion.'* 



The irritation produced by the introduction of rough 

 foreign bodies into the sheU is sufi&cient, it seems, to 

 draw to the spot a flow of the pearly secretion. Fabri- 

 cius saw, at Sir Joseph Banks's, some oysters from China, 

 with bits of metal within completely coated over in this 

 way; and the pearl-fishers are said to find more and finer 

 specimens in shells of an uneven than of a smooth sur- 

 face. Linnaeus, adopting the Chinese or some other 



* The pearly coating of these base metal beads is but the copy, 

 by oysters, of a peculiar species of forgery practised formerly iu 

 the fabrication oi foderate coins ; these consist of an interior or 

 anima of copper laminated on both sides with an apparently con- 

 tinuous coating of the purest silver ; a device which no modern 

 sagacity has been able to imitate or explain. 



