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PEARL.
The pearl, though last, is not least. Ranked among precious
stones, it is very far from being a stone, and is therefore less interesting
to the mineralogist than to Society. Its origin is not im-
pressive, like that of the diamond, which has to do with cataclysms
and subterranean fires, the titanic struggles of our planet to fit it-
self for man. It is, on the contrary the result of the humble mollusc,
lowest of organic life, to protect itself from an intruder, some foreign
inorganic substance, such as a grain of sand, a bit of wood,
the dead larvae of a fish. The rightful owner of the iridescent
watery home sets up a protest, exudes a potent secretion from its
useful mantle, and envelops the atom in a soft jelly-like substance enclosed
in a sac, which gradually hardening is later covered with
concentric layers of nacre, similar to the lining of its shell, and lo,
the pearl !
"Unable to resist, to rid itself of the opposing evil, it exercises
the power given to it by the Creator and converts the pain into perfection,
the grief into glory," says Kunz's "Book of the Pearl," almost
the last word on this absorbing subject. In the hardly more
poetic verse of Sir Edwin Arnold half a century ago :
Know you, perchance, how that poor formless
The Oyster gems his shallow moonlit chalice?
Where the shell irks him, or the sea-sand frets,
He sheds this lovely lustre on his grief.
wretch
To go back as
and lesson:
far as Hafiz, he too has his admonitory word
Learn from yon Orient shell to love thy foe,
And store with pearls the wound that brings thee woe.
The pearl oyster inhabits warm water; it never dwells very
far from the Equator. The most ancient fisheries were in the Persian
Gulf, about the Island of Behreim, a high dignitary of which once
said to a traveler : "We are all, from the highest to the lowest, the
slaves of one master Pearl." Yet now as in the past, the Gulf of
Manaar, in the shoal water between Ceylon and India, is the chief
source of supply of the best pearls for the whole world. They exist
there in great numbers, and while not of the largest size, they are
of the finest lustre. The Persian pearls are not as white as those
of Ceylon, but are larger. They are yellowish as a rule, though
pink and black are sometimes found, if not much valued there. The
yellowish are always favorites with the Orientals; they are more
becoming to their dusky skins, and are thought to retain their
lustre longer. It was a Persian pearl which was shown to the French
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