taken
in three years near New Boston, 111., from one bed. Reckoned by the
usual average this would mean not less than 100,000,000 shells. In some
beds, the mussels have been found several feet deep, the bottom layers
being dead.
Notwithstanding
the enormous numbers, these beds are often completely exhausted in a
few seasons. When the beds are first discovered, men will take as much
as 1500 to 2000 pounds of shell each, in a day's fishing. In one
hundred pounds of shells as they are taken, the average number of
valves or half shells will be, nigger-heads, about one thousand;
sand-shells, nine hundred; muckets, eight hundred, which would be an
average of nine thousand mussels per ton.
The
meat in a ton of nigger-heads weighs over three hundred pounds. This is
usually removed by the fishermen by boiling the mussels for ten or
fifteen minutes in crude sheet iron tanks when the shells open and the
fleshy part falls out or may be easily removed by hand. To show how
little the pearls they may contain enter into the calculations of these
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