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The Pearl
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Peru;
the mound-builders of North America possessed them; in the far East
they were cherished centuries before the then Western world of Europe
knew them; there is said to be a word meaning a pearl in a Chinese
dictionary four thousand years old, and who knows how old is their
presence in India.
Pearls
were in the jewel caskets of Egypt's Ptolemies; and the first jewel
mentioned in the most ancient decipherable and translatable writings
extant is the pearl, and its identity is unquestioned, because the gem
of the sea is solitary among jewels and is not to be confounded with
the hard mineral gems which, even to-day, with all the advance in
scientific knowledge, are constantly becoming mixed in the minds of
men. From written records the modern ken of pearls extends back about
twenty-three hundred years, and we hear of them in the writings of
Pliny, the indefatigable investigator and disseminator of what he
believed to be facts about almost everything in nature, who four
hundred years later gathered together the knowledge of his day about
pearls and included it in his voluminous literary grist.
In the technical literature of the United States National Museum, the pearl is coldly
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