Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London - University Library

LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. 29
Linnean secret whicli he ho,d purchased, and how his father could
not find the docnuients, which were supposed for a time to be lost,
and how he himself eventually found them when ruinaging amongst
a mass of family papers in search of a missing account. This
was at a time when he was leaving Sweden for England, and
his subsequent attempts to get the Swedish Government to buy
his rights and to promote pearl-formation as an industry were
apparently unsuccessful.
Since then nothing, I believe, has been done with the " secret,"
although various investigators and operators in different parts of
the world, including Mr. Hornell and myst-lf, have tried more or
less similar methods of stimulating molluscs to pearl-production
with but indifferent results. But I am by no means certain that
artificial margarosis, either by these or some other methods, mav
not some day become a commercial success.
Linnaeus says : '' As all the knacks of Nature are very simple, so
is this when properly hit upon " ; and there was certainly no
great complication about his process. We are now able by means
of these two manuscript books in our librar}' to make our the
details of the " secret process." By fitting the extracts labelled
A. to H. in the one set of papers into ihe lettered gaps in the
proceedings of the Secret Committee of 1761 in the other volume,
we have the completed description in Linujeus's own words.
Thn essential points made by Linuceus seem to be:— (I)
the formation of a pearl there is always some foreign
that in
matter
(" peregrinum ") which is slowly covered by successive lamellae of
cale ireous matter deposited by the mollusc ; (2) that to induce
pearl-formation when and where you wisli, you must make a very
small hole in the shell and insert a little round fragment of limestone
fixed on the end of a fine silver wire ; (3) that you must
keep these artificial nuclei near the ends of tlie shell, so as not to
interfere unduly with the animal's body ; and (4) that the nuclei
must, by means of tlie silver wire, be kept free from the shell so that
the resulting pearls may not become adherent to it by a deposit
of nacre.
That is all. It is certainly, as its author says, " very simple . , .
when properly hit upon." Simpler even than the ''knack of IS^ature,''
requiring a parasitic worm and several successive hosts, that we
now believe is necessary to produce the finest pearls. And yet
Linn;eus seems to have obtained by the process certain pearls
which the crown-jeweller declared to be in every way as good as
those produced naturally. Probably they w ere compared not with
the most precious pearls from the pearl-oysters of Eastern seas,
but with those of the Swedish fresh-water mussels {Unio mar-
garitifera).
Our General Secretary has kindly helped me to find in the
Linnean Collections the original shells and pearls made use of by
Linnaeus in his secret process, evidently the specimens which
J. P. Bagge was anxious to get from Sir J. E. Smith. These
Linnean specimens are now exhibited on the table.
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