NO. 51.— 1900.] PEARL FISHERIES. 



191 



he said :." Oh, oyster, come and walk with us." (Laughter.) I trust, 

 therefore, that the step taken with so much promptitude and public 

 spirit by Your Excellency and approved by the Secretary of State, in 

 referring Sir William Twynam's Report for the highest scientific 

 opinion in England, may result in a Scientific Mission of Inquiry and 

 Experiment. Professor Ray Lankester would seem to be a little 

 unjust to Mr. Holdsworth, who signed himself F.L.S., F.Z.S., and who 

 first showed us the difference between certain pearl or pearl shell 

 yielding oysters. But it was a fact that Mr. Holdsworth had never 

 seen a fishery or even a bank covered with our oysters ; and therefore 

 there was much reason to hope that Professor Herdman, F.R.S. — if he 

 came out, now that he and the scientific world know so much more 

 than in the "sixties," and especially if he had the help and experience 

 of our expert, Capt. Donnan, and was also lent the aid of Dr. Thurston 

 by the Indian authorities (who ought to be asked to join in the Mission 

 with Ceylon) — would be able to give us results worthy of his high 

 reputation and keen powers of observation. There was a great deal 

 of literature, including accounts of Pearl Fisheries and experiments, 

 to be collated — there might even be later reports in reference to 

 Californian and Central American Fisheries, than Mr. Collett or 

 himself had obtained ; — but not the least interesting contributions to 

 place before Professor Herdman would be both the valuable Papers 

 read that evening ; and Mr. Collett, by introducing the subject and 

 giving the Society so good a Paper, had laid the Members and the 

 whole intelligent community of Ceylon under a debt of gratitude, for 

 which he deserved the cordial vote of thanks he thus proposed with 

 great pleasure. (Applause.) 



Dr. Van Dort : — I have much pleasure in seconding the vote of 

 thanks to Mr. Collett for the very interesting Paper he has just read 

 to us. Although it professes to be only a resume of information 

 derived mostly from sober scientific journals and statistical reports 

 of a not especially enlivening nature, it has nothing of the dry-as-dust 

 character traditionally associated with Scientific Papers, but reads more 

 like an article intended for a popular monthly than a contribution to 

 a staid Scientific Journal like ours. To some extent, no doubt, he has 

 been inspired by his theme, which appeals to so many interests — historic, 

 poetic, economic, and even political — over and above its scientific 

 aspects, and has even allowed himself to subordinate the instincts of 

 the born naturalist to the demands of literary art, as, for instance, in 

 sandwiching the only technical portion of his Paper— not the least 

 important from a scientific point of view — between a quaint disquisition 

 on the right of an oyster to be called a fish (reminding one of Baron 

 Cuvier's famous criticism of the French Encyclopaedist's definition of 

 a crab), and an interesting speculation on the folk-lore relating to 

 the origin of Pearls. I, for one, was hoping that while in this mood 

 he would, even while accepting the ugly theory (if scientifically 



