but
were replaced as the centuries passed, by others who gave gaudy beads
and cloths of many colors and water that fired the soul and other
wonderful things, in exchange for the white beads of the sea, and so
the pearls of the unenlightened children of the South Seas passed to
the princes of the West, even as the same restless spirits, spreading
their sails to the winds of the great seas in the opposite direction,
brought them east from more barbarous shores far away to the westward.
/Our knowledge of pearls reaches back about twenty-three hundred years,
through the writÂings of Pliny, who nearly nineteen hundred years ago
gathered the facts of his day and the rumors of traditions concerning
them. Beyond' tKat~we can only surmise that in prehistoric ages, with
the dawn of intelligence in the infantile period of the race, men
dwelling near tropic seas were attracted by them as children are by
bright and pretty baubles; and that as humanity by families, tribes and
nations, grew out of savagery to the mental stature of a man, so pearls
grew to be jewels very precious.
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