-36 BREEDING PEARLS. 



tion of the difference between negative and positive evidence. I 

 must confess that twenty failures to breed pearls would, to me, 

 be quite set aside by one successful experiment — and so, I sup- 

 pose, they would to the other members of this Society. 



The scientific objections to the possibility of pearls " breeding" 

 cannot however be overlooked. The oyster or mussel pearl is, 

 as everybody knows, usually the result of a mucus secretion de- 

 posited by the animal on s)me (it may be microscopic) foreign 

 substance, though I believe this foreign substance is not always 

 to be detected by analysis. Now under no conceivable circum- 

 stances can mucus breed mucus when it has once hardened into 

 the lustrous nacre of a pearly surface. Without, as I have said, 

 wishing to support any specific theory, I should be inclined to 

 •suspect that the pearls produced result from the labours of some 

 insect which existed in the original oyster, and as a foreign 

 irritant body caused the deposition of a pearly secretion ; and 

 it may be that this insect exists and breeds in rice under cer- 

 tain circumstances: and that the original pearls have very 

 little, or perhaps nothing, to do with the production of new ones. 



Finally it may be worth while to cite another instance of an 

 .apparently incomprehensible freak of nature in a somewhat si- 

 milar way. Mr. Frank Buckland, the well known naturalist, in 

 the 2nd Volume of his " Curiosities of Natural History," relates 

 (p. 128), that his attention was excited by an advertisement 

 setting forth that an old China dinner-plate, which had been in 

 the possession of its owner's family for nearly 300 years, had 

 broken out in an eruption of crystals, the forms of which resem- 

 bled shrubs, flowers, &c. It was put on exhibition at one shilling 

 a head, and Mr. Buckland went to see it. " On examination with 

 " a magnifying glass," he says, " I observed numerous excres- 

 " cences of a whitish opaque substance, apparently growing or 

 u extending themselves out of the centre and rim of the plate, 

 ", each supporting upon its surface a portion of the actual enamel 

 " of the plate. The largest eruption (if it may be so called) is 

 " about the size and shape of a fourpenny bit, and it has raised 

 " up a portion of the enamel above the surface of the plate to 

 4t . about the height represented by the thickness of a new penny 

 u piece" Mr. Buckland then gives further particulars of this sin- 

 gular growth, concluding" with the remark "I have not the sligh- 

 u test doubt that this is a natural production ; that the material 

 " is of a mineral parisitic growth resulting from some ehemical 

 " decomposition of the clay of which the plate was originally 

 11 formed." Now, it will, I think, be allowed on all hands that 

 the idea of a China plate 300 years old producing a •' growth" 

 of any sort is as unexpected and unexplainable a phenomenon as 



