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THE FASHION OF PEARLS
of
wearing pearls. For several centuries they were in vogue, so much so
that edicts were issued restricting them to certain classes. Since that
time, the very general use of them by persons of high station in
Europe, beyond all other gems, seems to have been confined to the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is now being revived at the
opening of the twentieth
There
is one fashion of wearing pearls which is common to all ages and races,
viz. strung as beads in chains to hang about the neck. The
mound-builders of North America, the Indians of the Mississippi Valley,
of Virginia, of the coasts of Florida, of the lands around the Gulf of
Mexico and everywhere in New Spain, all wore them so. Egyptians,
Persians, Arabians, Hindus, Singhalese and South Sea islanders, many of
them without knowledge of countries or peoples beyond their own or very
near terÂritory, alike-adopted this fashion. And it has been followed
by every newer people, as they acquired by trade or the sword, the
pearls with which to so adorn themselves.
In lands of tropic heat the women wound these strings of pearls about their arms, wrists
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