Consider the
number of these jewels which fade away to their original elements
in the depths of ocean: for one we get, a million decomposed.
Did the poet know how true his words were when he said:
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear."
The government brings the oysters to the beach and sells them to
the highest bidders in lots of one thousand. Can you conceive of a
prettier game of chance than this! Imagine the natives at work
opening the rough shells, expecting at every turn to find a pearl
worth a fortune!
The pearl fishers descend six to eight fathoms forty or fifty
times a day, and can remain under water from a minute to a minute
and a half. So much for practice. In the course of a million or
hundred million years, more or less, each successive generation
pursuing this calling, under the law of inherited tendencies,
these people might well return to the amphibious state and give us
an illustration of evolution, backward.
The pearl oyster is a large, round bivalve, sometimes twelve
inches in diameter. If Thackeray felt, as he said when he first
tried a Rockaway, as if he were swallowing a baby, what would have
been his impressions if he had tickled his throat with one of
these monsters? Sometimes a dozen, or even twenty pearls, are said
to have been found in a single oyster.
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