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THE BOOK OF THE PEARL
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with
rice-growing and silk-culture. To some of them it is the chief source
of income, single families realizing as much as 300 silver dollars
annually therefrom. In the village of Chung-kwan-o, the headquarters
for culture pearls in China, a temple has been erected to the memory of
the originator of this industry, Yu Shun Yang, who lived late in the
thirteenth century, and was an ancestor of many persons now employed
thereby.
The
method in vogue in China for so many centuries has been the
starting-point for similar attempts in various other countries. During
the New Jersey pearling excitement in 1857, there were found several
spherical pieces of nacre which had been introduced into Unios
apparently for experimental pearl-culture; and in the collection of
shells bequeathed to the United States National Museum by the late Dr.
Isaac Lea, is a hemispherical piece of candle grease partly coated with
pinkish nacre. Kelaart applied the Chinese method to the Ceylon
pearl-oysters with much success in 1858. At the Berlin Fisheries
Exhibition, in 1880, appeared the results of experiments in growing
culture pearls in the river mussels in Saxony. Small foreign bodies had
been introduced in the mantle, and others had been inserted between
the mantle and the shell. These nuclei consisted of shell beads,
unsightly pearls from other mussels, etc. ; but unfortunately the shape
of these was such that the mantle could not fit closely around them,
consequently the result was so irregular as to be of no value except to
show that German Unios as well as those of China could be made to cover
foreign objects with pearly material.
Professor
Herdman notes that, between 1751 and 1754, an inspector named Frederick
Hedenberg received an annual salary "to inoculate the pearl mussels of
Lulea (in the northern
part of Sweden) with 'pearl-seeds' which he manufactured, and then to
replant the mussels. Certain pearls were produced by the inspector,
which it is recorded were sold for some 300 silver dollars."1
As
noted by Broussonnet, in Finland artificial pearls were produced by
inserting a round piece of nacre between the inner face of the shell
and the mantle. The owner of the pearl fisheries at Vilshofen has
succeeded in producing pearly figures by introducing into the mollusk
fiat figures of pewter, most of them representing fish in form.
In
1884, Bouchon-Brandely made experiments in pearl production at Tahiti.
Gimlet holes about half an inch in diameter were drilled through
different places in the shells of pearl-oysters, and through each of
these holes a pellet of nacre or of glass was inserted and held by
brass wire passing through a stopper of cork or burao wood, by means of
which each opening was hermetically closed, so that the
1 "Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London," October, 1905, p. 28.
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