the immense amount of fish of all kinds which London grasps by means of its gigantic iron arms, its railways and its steamers, from every sea that beats against the island-coast, and brings here in one point together. There he sees superb salmons, fresh from the friths and bays of Scotland, or from the fertile Irish seas, floundering about; delicate red mullet, all the way from Cornwall, which await being carried to the West End; smelts, with delicate skins varying in hue like an opal, brought from Holland in Dutch boats; pyramids of lobsters, a vast moving mass of spiteful claws and restless feelers, savage at being torn from their clear, cool homes in Norwegian waters; and perhaps a royal sturgeon of colossal dimensions, dragged with ropes through the excited crowd by a yelling knot of men. Among these there are heaped up such mountains of oysters as to appal the inexperienced, and down Oyster-street, as it is called, lie long lines of oyster-boats, moored side by side, and heaping full of natives and the lower kinds. And yet the railways bring in even larger supplies, especially since the discovery of a great natural bed, called the Mid-Channel Bed, which stretches for forty miles between the ports of Shoreham and Havre, and has proved, as the dredging-ground is free to all comers, a source of vast wealth. Nor are private banks less remarkable for their extent; so that long years ago a Mr. Alston, then the largest oysterfisher in the world, could, in a single year, send fifty thousand bushels from one of his parks to London, and pay eight hundred pounds metage to the owners of the market. The whole supply, now, is stated at eight hundred millions a-year, and yet there is a pause, at least during a part of

"those four sad months, wherein is mute That one mysterious letter, that has power To call the oyster from the vasty deep." The question has often been raised, why, if oysters are really the greatest of gastronomic blessings, and life is proverbially short, the dainty creatures should not be eaten all the year round.

The prejudice, however, which forbids them during the months that have no letter R in their names, is not altogether unfounded. In May and June they generally spawn, and then their life's blood is essentially changed for the benefit of their posterity, and their own flesh is lean and unpalatable. Besides, however productive they may be, a conscientious lover of the mollusc will hardly reconcile himself to the barbarous waste of swallowing with each living parent a million of promising offspring. In the next two months the heat is apt to be so great as seriously to endanger all oysters that are not eaten immediately after they are taken from the water; and one spoiled oyster does more harm than a thousand good ones. Hence the English rarely have them brought to market before the first days of August, when the "common oysters" from Colchester and Feversham appear gradually, but the "melting natives " are not seen before the beginning of October, reach their meridian of perfection at Christmas, and disappear again towards the end of April.

In the remaining months, however, they throng the markets of the world, and then they are eaten by old and young, by rich and poor, the only meat which men eat alive and yet account it not cruelty," as old Fuller says quaintly. For this is their great merit, that one may eat them to-day, to-morrow, and forever, and as many as one wants, and yet their presence hardly makes itself felt, while they gratify the palate, quiet the excitement of certain nerves which we call hunger, and leave no feeling of satiety, no reproach, no remorse for the following day. They are the true grata ingluvies of Horace. Hence we marvel how a clever man like Malherbe could say that he knew nothing nobler in the world than women and melons, and yet, living as he did on the coast of Normandy, and near the finest of oyster-banks, forget oysters! We all know men with whom women do not agree, and how many of us can eat melons with impunity; but who ever heard of fresh oysters making

themselves at all disagreeable? They can, moreover, be eaten at all times of the day; they are good at breakfast, excellent as a prelude to dinner, and Juvenal speaks already of his beloved Venus Ebria,

"who at deep midnight on fat oysters sups, And froths with unguents her Falernian cups." The true way to eat them, profitably to taste, health, and enjoyment, is, of course, to eat them raw, and without condiment; for vinegar, pepper, or lemonjuice all spoil the natural flavor of the bivalve. The only good dressing is its own gravy, which is not sea-water, as many fancy, but its life's blood, which it sheds when the shell is violently broken open. Hence a master of the art says of all other ways of dressing: "Frivolity! profanity! sacrilege! If after such treatment they taste well, they are no longer oysters; if they are still oysters, they have no longer any taste;" and the poet adds sagely, that in his view oysters ought to be eaten, as we love to see white roses-with the dew of a fine summer morning on their tender leaves. To all of which famous Dr. Kitchener adds, with refined cruelty: "Those who wish to enjoy this delicious restorative in its utmost perfection, must eat it the moment it is opened, with its own gravy in the under shell; if not eaten absolutely alive, its flavor and spirit are lost. The true lover of an oyster will have some regard for the feelings of his little favorite, and contrive to detach the fish from the shell so dexterously that he is hardly conscious he has been ejected from his lodging till he feels the teeth of the gourmet tickling him to death." Would Dr. Kitchener be very grateful for being tickled to death?

if dressings are not allowed, some drink to accompany the mollusc on its way is generally considered indispensable. Strong wines and liquors should be eschewed, although in this country whiskey or gin, and in Germany and Russia rum, is taken with them; these beverages simply pickle the oyster at once, and deprive it of its best qualities as nutritious, digestible food.

Lighter French wines are less objectionable, such as Chablis, Sauterne, and even Moselle, but Port is said to turn them into stone; porter and ale, on the contrary, and, better still, half-and-half, are considered the true friends of the oyster.

The question as to how many may be eaten at a time is fraught with great difficulty, for here men differ as well as doctors. The experienced say that oysters after the fifth or sixth dozen cease to be a delight; specially favored individuals speak of seven or eight as profitable in times of great political or domestic excitement, when the system has to be appeased by a specially cooling and soothing food. But Brillat Savarin, in his admirable book on Taste, expresses a different opinion. "It is well known," he says, "that formerly, under the Louises, before the Revolution, every festive meal began with oysters, and that a certain number of guests were always found who did not rest until they had eaten a gross, viz., twelve dozen. The abbés of those happy days, especially, never were content with less, and the chevaliers often went beyond them. As I wished to know the exact value and weight of such a preparation for a good meal, I took my scales, and found that twelve dozen oysters, with the water they contained, weighed exactly three pounds. How much happier, now, were these worthy guests with such a weight of oysters, than if they had eaten three pounds of meat or even of poultry!" A handsome compliment, surely, to our friends, the oysters, which could not have been more happily turned by-the best of cooks. In another place he adds a remarkable instance of individual capacity. It seems that he accidentally fell in, in 1798, with a certain Laperte, officer in one of the public courts, who professed to be passionately fond of oysters, but never to have had, as he said, "his fill" of them. The author offered to give him that satisfaction, and invited him to dine the next day at his house. The gourmet came, and Brillat kept him company up to the third dozen, when

he let him go his way unaided. He marched on bravely, till he reached the thirty-second dozen, which he did in about an hour, as the man who opened the oysters was not very expert. Brillat became impatient, not at the endless capacity, but at his own forced inactivity, thinking it both "painful and unwholesome to sit at table without eating," and stopped his valiant guest in the midst of his exploit. He expressed his regrets that the Fates had evidently denied him the privilege to let his friend have his fill that day, and invited him now to join him at dinner. The guest assented, and behold! to the author's amazement, he went to work with all the energy and perseverance of a man who had sat down to table after long fasting!

It is not impossible that this happy Laperte may have belonged to the school of the poet Lainez, in Paris, who was asked, after four hours' active devotion to an uninterrupted dinner, if he had dined yet, and replied, indignantly: "Do you imagine my stomach is endowed with memory?" Whereupon he resumed his work with renewed zeal and increased vigor.

There is comfort in the thought that even in such extreme cases no man has yet been known to have suffered seriously because he loved oysters "not wisely but too well." There is comfort, also, in the fact that all the voracity of man could make no impression on the vast numbers of oysters which exist in our seas. Spenser already said, it was

"much more eath to tell the stars on high, Albe they endless seem in estimation,

Than to recount the sea's posterity;

So fertile be the floods in generations,

So huge their numbers, and so numberless their nations."

Natural beds and banks of oysters are found in all the seas of the temperate and torrid zones, now stretching out miles after miles in all directions, and now rising so high that ships are wrecked on their crests. And thus it has been apparently from time immemorial, for gigantic structures, consisting of fossil oysters, are found in many places. In Berkshire, England, a petrified col

ony of oysters covers more than six acres; in Massachusetts and Georgia enormous breakwaters are formed between the firm land and the hungry ocean, ramparts twelve to fifteen feet high, the lower layers of course fossil, but the upper strata alive, and affording delicious food to the negro of our day, as their forefathers did to the Indians, and perhaps to the Aztecs. On the west coast of this continent vast surfaces are covered with fossil oysters, which have been raised by volcanic action, and now tower to the height of sixty feet and more, for thirty miles at a time.

Among the living, however, there is as great a difference as among the races of men. Those of our country are acknowledged to surpass in size and luscious flavor all others, and even English travellers, like Charles Mackay, have acknowledged them to be superior to the famous Whitstables at home. But Frenchmen, accustomed to their own smaller and richer oysters, with a strong taste of copper, object to their inconvenient dimensions, and miss the metallic flavor. Germans, utterly at sea in all that concerns the sea, either do not appreciate oysters at all, or, if they do, are enraptured by the ample provision contained in each shell and the amount of lager it requires for easy conveyance. Next to our own come undoubtedly the English oysters, of which there are many varieties, the best growing on submarine rocks, an inferior kind on sandbanks, and the coarsest on muddy bottoms. England values them largely according to size, and sends the smallest kind, called Dutch-size, over to Holland. The common oyster from the Western coast is very large, with thick shells, and little meat. The Colchesters go by the name of Middle Ware, and are larger than the best kind, the Little Natives, reared carefully at the mouths of a number of small rivers and in Southampton Water. Scotland is justly proud of her Pandores, so called because they are found near the saltpans in the neighborhood of historic Prestonpans, and caught, it is said, by

a bit of magic. The fishing-crews keep up, while the dredging is going on, a kind of wild, monotonous chant, to which they ascribe great virtue, and sing:

"The herring loves the merry moonlight,
The mackerel loves the wind;

But the oyster loves the dredger's song,
For he comes of a gentler kind."

Paddy claims for his Pooldoodies of Burra, and especially for his Carlingfords, that they are superior to all the world, and is as usually correct in his patriotism, but mistaken in his assertion. They are very fine, however, with a dark, almost black beard and delicious flavor, but not to be compared to some of our own varieties. The natives of England are largely sent over to Ostend, to be cleaned and fattened in Belgian parks, and then assume a perfection almost unsurpassed. The shell becomes very fine, almost transparent; the fish is small, but rich and beautifully white, and bearing to the best of common oysters the relation that a well-fed capon bears to an ordinary chicken. This is the oyster which gourmets prefer to all others. It goes from Ostend all over Germany, to Russia, and even to distant Odessa.

French oysters are limited to northern seas, the Mediterranean coast having none that are worth eating. Those raised at Marennes in the Bay of Biscay, and at the Roches de Cancale, are the most famous, though the whole coast, from Normandy to Dunkirk, abounds in excellent kinds; they are brought, to the amount of about two hundred millions a-year, to the Rue Montorgueil, which is to Paris what Billingsgate is to London. The most striking feature, however, is the preference which Parisians give to green oysters, and the pains which are therefore taken to produce the color artificially, by favoring the growth of certain sea-algæ. These parasitic plants, when once introduced into oyster-parks, 800n cover the walls and rocks, and gradually spread their transparent veil over the molluscs themselves. The adversaries-for, like all superior things in

this world, oysters, and especially green oysters, meet with opposition at times -say that the green matter enters into the gills of the luckless creature, stops the breathing, and thus causes dropsy. The disease makes the oyster to swell, by which process the texture of its meat becomes looser, finer, and more palatable; and epicureans revel in dropsical shellfish as they delight in diseased gooselivers. The Baltic has a small supply of the precious molluscs, but the variety is coarse and insipid, probably because the waters of that sea are not salt enough; those of the Adriatic, however, and of the Bosphorus, are better, and in great demand during the long fasts of the Greek Church.

Wherever the oyster, therefore, appears in sufficient quantities, there men are found ready to consume them as fast as they can be procured; but the poor unselfish oyster has enemies nearer home, in its own native element, and close upon its borders. The arch-enemy is the sleepy, stupid-looking starfish, the Master Fivefingers of our boys, who eats them as spat, or even when grown to considerable size. These greedy deyourers have the curious power of rolling themselves up and floating away, so that they appear and vanish again, no one knows how. But all of a sudden, and often at the very time when the sanguine fisherman gets ready to reap a rich harvest from a well-stocked oyster-bank, he finds, upon coming to the grounds, that the foe has been there before him, and millions of starfishes have settled down, like a flock of wild pigeons on a field of wheat. Generally, they prefer the spat or very young oysters, which they take whole into their capacious mouths, and there digest slowly. But how do these tender, fragile creatures manage to get at the fullgrown mollusc in its impregnable fortress? The ancients had a story, that they watched it till they found it incautiously yawning, and then slily slipped their greedy fingers between the valves to keep them open, while they devoured the contents. This is, of course, a mere fable, as the soft, slimy finger would be

squeezed off in an instant, even if the starfish were not famous for falling to pieces by immediate suicide as soon as it is brought into contact with a hard substance. Its murderous assault is far more curious. The first step in the process is for the enemy to lie close upon its prey, folding its slimy arms tightly over it, so as to hold itself in the right position. Then it applies its mouth closely to the victim, and as it cannot, by any force of its own, put the oyster into its stomach, it deliberately proceeds to put its stomach into the oyster! It begins slowly but steadily to push out this organ through the mouth, and wraps the mollusc in the folds of that capacious bag; patience always does its work, and in due time the hapless native surrenders to the devourer.

Another enemy shows, if less originality, at least equal perseverance. This is the whelk, who also seems, like the vulture, to smell its prey from afar, and although endowed with very slender means of locomotion, appears in vast multitudes, when least expected, on the oyster-beds which it deems ready for use. It assails the shell boldly from above, and with marvellous patience drills, by means of its sharp tongue, a hole in the upper valve, by which it gets at last fairly inside, and then enjoys the dainty food. Mussels come by myriads, when young, and cover the luckless oyster with a fine, ropy texture, which catches mud and sand, and finally smothers them; and gray mullets appear in swarms, and, greedily grubbing, devour whole beds of well-fattened natives. Even the elements combine against the helpless mollusc; heavy gales of wind at times roll them up in ridges three feet deep, when mud and seaweeds settle on them and choke them speedily; or frost and snow and ice kill large numbers, when they are not safely sheltered at a depth of at least three or four feet of water. Thus it is, that by the wise provisions of Nature, the danger of overstocking her vast reserves is avoided; for wherever animals multiply their species at such enormous rates, there are, on the other side, numerous enemies

ever present to keep it down and to prevent an undue preponderance.

All the voracity of man, however, and all the persecution of enemies, does not destroy enough oysters annually to prevent them from forming, as we have seen, gigantic deposits in various parts of the globe. For, if left to themselves, oysters grow old and die a natural death, though it has not yet been ascertained fully what age they are allowed to reach in their solitude. The expert fisherman, it is true, can tell at a glance and to a nicety the precise age of his flock. He examines the successive layers on the upper shell, technically called shoots, and as each of them, overlapping the lower, marks a year, he is at no loss to ascertain how old the house and the inhabitant-for they are always of the same age. These layers, it seems, are regular, and laid in even succession one upon the other, until the oyster attains its maturity, which is generally fixed at seven or eight years; but after that time they become irregular, are recklessly piled upon each other, and make the shell look bulky and illshapen. As some molluscs have been found with shells nine inches thick and of a perfectly enormous size, it is fair to presume that the oyster, when left to its natural changes and unmolested, may reach a patriarchal age, and even outlive our race.

Unfortunately, man nowadays rarely allows them to pursue the even tenor of their life. On the pretext of protecting them against their powerful enemies and of improving their race-pleas not quite unknown to certain nations of our day-they are taken when quite young from their home, and brought to socalled seafarms, where they live, safe against all danger, well-fed and happy, and reward the favor shown them by increasing at least to double their value. Little is known of the labor and expense, the care and attention bestowed upon the apparently trifling mollusc, in order to make it acceptable to fastidious palates or even simply fit for market. First, the spat, or fecundated sperm, is stored up in large vats, specially de