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194 Pearls.
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their
benefactress ; but in consequence of the exhaustion of the beds by
yearly fishing, sufficient Pearls could not be found in Ceylon, and the
order had to be executed in London. Between 1837 and 1855 there were no
fisheries.
It
is said that 150 Pearls, mostly small ones, have been found in one
oyster. This would, no doubt, be a group of seed Pearls, clustered
together like a bunch of grapes. At the fishery of 1828, Captain
Stewart counted 67, taken from one of the oysters which fell to
him as his official privilege; but the vast proportion of the oysters
contained no Pearls. He also saw ten Pearls and some crushed
oyster-shells taken from the stomach of a fish called the " chartree."
In
order to extract the Pearls from the oysters, the molluscs are allowed
to putrefy, and are then washed in water, whereby the decaying organic
matter is removed, and the coveted Pearl, if present, readily found.
During this operation, the decomposing molluscs exhale "an ancient and
fish-like smell," which is in the highest degree repulsive. A writer in
Fraser1 s Magazine, for i860, who had visited the fishery at Aripu, says that "a more disgusting spectacle can hardly be conceived than that of a crowd of women and children, employed
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