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Actinia, and stones. In this manner the common oyster fields on both 
s kles of the Channel were ploughed np by the oyster dredger pretty 
much as the ploughman on shore turns up a field. The consequence 
'ms that, twenty years ago, the French beds were totally exhausted, 
a nd France had to look to foreign countries for its oyster. Oyster 
farms which had employed fourteen hundred men and two hundred 
Wts were reduced to two hundred men and twenty boats. Similar 
Results from over-dredging would have followed, no doubt, on this side 
fhe Channel had the mollusc not been protected by the company and 
larvate proprietors who held the oyster-beds in the large estuaries. 
This state of things in France led to some important discoveries in 
science of oyster culture, which have produced important changes 
there. 
Tlie name of Sergius Orata has already been mentioned as a cnlti- 
Va tor of' oysters. He lived in the fifth century before our era, and 
Wording to Pliny he first attempted parking oysters at JBaia in the 
I'mes of the orator Lucius Crassus. He was the first to recognise the 
Su Perior flavour of the oysters of the Lucrin Lake, the Avernus of the 
P°ets, probably for trade reasons of his own, for then, as now, Reveille- 
f 'Hise remarks, writing on the subject, “ tradesmen speculated on the 
We aknesses of human gourmandism.” But Sergius really created a 
industry, which is still practised in thousands of places much as 
left it. As a proof of the perfection to which Sergius had brought 
oyster culture, his contemporaries said of him, in allusion to the 
Ja Hging hanks which he invented, that if he had been prevented from 
Rising oysters in the Lucrin Lake, “he would have made them 
jiiow on tiie house-tops.” Tire traveller who visits this celebrated 
, e firulg only a miry puddle. The precious oysters placed there by 
j dines grandfather are metamorphosed into miserable eels, which 
ea P in the mud, a vile mountain of ashes, coal, and pumice-stone, 
^kich was thrown up in a night like the mushroom, having reduced 
6 once celebrated lake into the state described, 
lloiideletius also speaks of a fisherman who understood the art of 
y^ter culture. 
The Neapolitan Lake Fusaro — the terrible Acheron of the poets — is 
great oyster-park, in which Art is made effectually to aid Nature in 
■ e multiplication of its products. This famous oyster-bank, which 
ls ^presented in Pl. XIII., lies in the neighbourhood of Baia and 
