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JOURNAL, R.A.S. (CEYLON). [VOL. XVIII. 
not to the Museum only, but also, I think, to the Asiatic Society, will 
be undertaken next year. 
Dr. Wiley has begun the publication in Spolia Zeylanica of informa- 
tion regarding the work of the Museum . The first volume has recently 
been most successfully completed. This should be of real use not 
only within the Island, but as a means of spreading information as to 
the Island to parts beyond. 
There are several men of science whose work is not purely botanical, 
who make their headquarters at Peradeniya. These include the 
Government Mycologist and the Entomologist. Much scientific work, 
other than botanical, is in consequence centred at Peradeniya. This 
is perhaps as well, for the Entomologist's work is connected with the 
effect of insect ravages on plants, especially cultivated plants on estates, 
and this can best be studied in the Botanical Gardens At the same 
time it would perhaps be more useful if these gentlemen were also more 
closely connected than they are now with other interests, and parti- 
cularly the Museum here in Colombo. I am well aware that the 
Peradeniya staff is always ready to give every assistance it possibly 
€an to the Museum ; but I have it in my mind that it would be an 
excellent thing if the staffs of the Museum and of the Marine 
Biological Institute and of the other scientific institutions of the 
Island were in closer touch with one another. They would all be more 
useful, and would work to far better purpose if they were all joined 
together as a board of scientific advisers, such as has been established 
in India. 
The most interesting scientific thing in Ceylon at the present time is 
the investigation by Professor Herdman and Mr. Hornell into the Pearl 
Fishery and the life-history of the pearl-mussel, I must not call it 
an oyster. It is a matter on which I find it difficult to say in a few 
words all that is in my mind. I have been following Professor Herd- 
man's publications and Mr. Hornell's diaries, and have been very much 
struck with the enormous number of very minute facts, of which even 
the practical man in charge of the Island's revenues, the man of whom 
I was speaking earlier in the evening, would appreciate the importance 
when they are so presented as to display their practical results. We did 
not know, in fact no one knew, until lately, exactly what a pearl was. 
For two years now the gentlemen to whom I have alluded and others 
have been investigating in all sorts of places, and have accumulated an 
extraordinary number of very small facts, utterly unimportant by 
themselves, but which, when put together, reveal most interesting 
secrets. We now know practically the whole life-history of the pearl- 
mussel, from the beginning to the end. We know that the presence of 
the pearl, at any rate of the good pearl, in the mussel is one incident 
in a cycle of life-history which is continually being re-enacted in our 
seas. The immediate cause of the pearl — again, I say, of the good 
pearl — is a small tapeworm which, like the caterpillar, the chrysalis, the 
butterfly, and the egg which the butterfly lays and which recommences 
the cycle as a caterpillar, passes through various phases. At one 
period of its life it hangs on by suckers and hooks to the intestines of 
a sting-ray. Thence, from time to time, it lets fall joints of its own 
body, each laden with eggs. These joints pass out of the ray and burst, 
and the freed eggs, when hatched, live for a time as tiny animals 
swimming freely in the sea. These small creatures next take refuge 
within the shells of the mussel, causing their host a good deal of 
inconvenience and discomfort. The mussel, tickled and irritated, tries 
