For nearly four hundred years, pearls and pearl shells have been the most beautiful objects which have reached the outside world from the many islands of the Malay Archipelago. On his visit to this part of the world in 1520, Pigopitta, a companion of Magalhães, reported pearls among the prized possessions of the natives. The fisheries have never been of great importance, although the reefs are widely scattered throughout the archipelago, and the possibilities seem favorable for very great development. Thomas de Comyn stated a century ago, that pearl fisheries had been undertaken “from time to time about Mindanao, Zebu, and some of the smaller islands, but with little success and less regularity, not because of a scarcity of fine pearls, but on account of a lack of skill of the divers and their well-established dread of sharks.”[264] Giacinto Gemmi,[265] writing of Philippine pearls, repeats a strange tale from the “Storia de Mindanao” by the Jesuit father, Combes, to the effect that in a certain spot, under many fathoms of water, there was a pearl of inestimable value, as large as an egg; but, although the king’s ministers had made every effort to have it secured, they had always been unsuccessful. During the last thirty years, pearls and pearl shells have been secured from most of the inshore waters of Malaysia, but the output has not been so regular or so extensive as the conditions seem to warrant. Our observation leads to the conviction that this is not due so much to lack of skill on the part of the divers, or to their dread of sharks, mentioned by Comyn; but to the fact that foreign capital, attracted to this part of the world, has found more security and profit in developing plantations, and the natives have not had sufficient enterprise to systematize and develop the fishery resources. Throughout Malaysia, including the Philippine Islands, the pearl is known as _mutya_, _mootara_, or a similar name, closely resembling the Sanskrit _mukta_ or the Cingalese _mootoo_, indicating the source of the influence originating the fishery and trade. The most widely-known pearl fisheries of Malaysia are in the Sulu Archipelago, a group of islands comprising about 1000 square miles in area, and containing a population of 100,000. The beautiful yellow pearls shared with the many acts of piracy in attracting attention to this group previous to 1878, when the islands were brought under the influence of Spanish rule; and since the Spanish-American War, pearl fishing has been the leading industry, though it has received less attention from outside sources, perhaps, than has the existence of slavery and harems as part of the social system.