Some asked how pearls did grow, and where. Then spoke I to my girl, To part her lips, and show them there The quarelets of pearl. HERRICK, _The Quarrie of Pearls_. The great profit that would accrue from an increased output of pearls has long directed attention to the problem of bringing this about by artificial means. In his life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus, a Greek writer of the third century, repeats a story afloat at the time, which credited the Arabs of the Red Sea with possessing some method of growing pearls artificially. The story as it reached Greece was that they first poured oil upon the sea for the purpose of calming the waves, and then dived down and caused the oysters to open their shells. Having effected this, they pricked the flesh with a sharp instrument and received the liquor which flowed from the wounds into suitable molds, and this liquor there hardened into the shape, color, and consistence of the natural gems.[324] While the description given by Philostratus is charged with many improbable details, and could scarcely develop belief, even in the most credulous, as to the exact method of procedure, it seems that the story may not have been wholly without foundation, and that attempts were made at that remote date to stimulate the growth of pearls. In more modern times, the possibility of aiding or starting pearly formations in mollusks seems first to have been conceived by the Chinese about the fourteenth century. In 1736 there appeared in that storehouse of Oriental information, “Lettres édifiantes et curieuses écrites des missions étrangères,”[325] a communication from F. X. de Entrecolles, dated Pekin, 4th November, 1734, which set forth that there were people in China who busied themselves with growing pearls, and the product was not only vastly superior to the imitations manufactured in Europe, but were scarcely to be distinguished from the genuine. From Father Entrecolles’s very detailed quotation of his unnamed Chinese authority, we condense this account. In a basin one half full of fresh water, place the largest mussels obtainable, set this basin in a secluded place where the dew may fall thereon, but where no female approaches, and neither the barking of dogs nor the crowing of chickens is to be heard. Pulverize some seed-pearls (_Yo tchu_), such as are commonly used in medicine, moisten this powder with juice expressed from leaves of a species of holly (_Che ta-kong lao_), and then roll the moistened powder into perfectly round pellets the size of a pea. These are permitted to dry under a moderate sunlight, and then are carefully inserted within the open shells of the mollusks. Each day for one hundred days the mussels are nourished with equal parts of powdered ginseng, china root, _peki_, which is a root more glutinous than isinglass, and of _pecho_, another medicinal root, all combined with honey and molded in the form