288 PEOSE HIALIEUTICS. 



equally successful method of forcing pearl-oysters to be 

 industrious in their craft, became at last a great adept 

 in the art, and offered to divulge the secret to Govern- 

 ment for eighteen thousand copper doUars. His Govern- 

 ment however, proving, as ours often does, penny-wise 

 and pound-foolish, did not close with the proposal, ena- 

 bling one Bagge, of Gottenburg, to bag the discovery, but 

 apparently not to profit by it, for the sealed recipe appeared 

 agaia in the market in 1780, subsequent to which, says 

 Beckmaim, all traces of it have been lost. He adds, 

 ' Linnseus once showed me a small box of pearls, saying. 

 These are my handiwork, and, large as they are, I was 

 but five years in producing them.' Beckmann told him 

 he guessed by what process they had been made, and 

 quoted a passage from an early work of the Swedish na- 

 turalist, wherein he defines a pearl to be an ' excrescence 

 on the inside of a shell when the outside has been 

 pierced,' on which he took huff, asked no more questions, 

 and abruptly changed the discourse. The success of 

 Linnseus however would seem to have been unusually 

 great, many persons having tried, both by drilling the 

 shell and wounding the flesh, to produce pearls, without 

 obtaining the desired results. 



The ancients adopted a much more expeditious way to 

 obtain a supply of pearls than that in vogue amongst the 

 slow subjects of the Celestial Empire. When they had 

 smoothed the water with oil, the better to make out 

 where the gapiag bivalves lay, they quickly pierced the 

 shells, and received the silvery ichor, which instantly 

 flowed from the wound, into a number of metallic cavities, 

 where it hardened into pearl. This process of drawing 

 off pearl-juice, by tapping the molluscs which circulate 

 it, was again, had recourse to, it appears, at a very early 

 period of our own era. Pbny, who does not mention it, 

 has however a passage where he speaks of the fisher- 

 men's 'burglarious attempt upon pearl shells, and how it 



