Corals
are principally used for ornaments, in the East Indies, China, and
Africa, where they are preferred to the diamond. Almost every East
India lady wears a bracelet or necklace of corals.
The white coral has its origin from the eight-star coral (madrepora occulta); and the black coral from the black-horned coral (gorgonia antipothes). The medusa head {caput medusae), called
the sea polen, belongs likewise to the coral family, and consists of
sixty-two thousand six hundred and sixty-six articulated members.
Corals
are fished for on the coast of Barbary, between Tunis and Algiers; in
the latter state Bona is the principal station; the French have one
also at Basteon de France.
The
monopoly was purchased by France, in the seventeenth century, at
eighteen thousand dollars annually; and by England, since 1806, for
fifty thousand dollars.
At.
Bona there is a summer fishery, from the first of April to the first of
October, which occupied, in 1821, thirty French, seventy Sardinian,
thirty-nine Tuscanian, ' eighty-three Neapolitan, nineteen Sicilian
barks; altogether, two hundred barks of two thousand and twenty-three
tons capacity, with two thousand two hundred and seventy-four men; they
fished up forty-four thousand two hundred pounds of coral, valued at
two million four hundred thousand francs. The winter fishery of the
same year occupied three French barks, each with nine men, and they
obtained six hundred and eighty pounds of coral.
The
principal manufactories of corals are now at Leghorn, where this
branch of business has been carried on for two hundred years past, by
the Jews. There were formerly twenty establishments, but the number
has lately been much diminished.
They are sent principally to China, the East Indies, and Arabia, partly by the way of London, and partly by Mos-
