The oyster can be cooked in many ways, but the pure animal is the best of all, and gulping him up in his own juice is the best way to eat him. The oyster, I maintain, may be eaten raw, day by day, every day of the 214 days that it is in season, and never do hurt. It never produces indigestion—never does the flavour pall. The man who ends the day with an oyster in his mouth rises with a clean tongue in the morning, and a clear head as well. The secret of there being only a holding-on place required for the spat of the oyster to insure an immensely-increased supply having been penetrated by the French people—and no doubt they are in some degree indebted to our oyster-beds on the Colne and at Whitstable for their idea—the plan of systematic oyster-culture was easy enough, as I will immediately show. A few initiatory experiments, in fact, speedily settled that oysters could be grown in any quantity. Strong pillars of wood were driven into the mud and sand; arms were added; the whole was interlaced with branches of trees, and various boughs besides were hung over the beds on ropes and chains, whilst others were sunk in the water and kept down by a weight. A few boat-loads of oysters being laid down, the spat had no distance to travel in search of a home, but found a resting-place almost at the moment of being exuded; and, as the fairy legends say, “it grew and it grew,” till, in the fulness of time, it became a marketable commodity. But the history of this modern phase of oyster-farming, as practised on the foreshores of France, is so interesting as to demand at my hands a rather detailed notice, for it is one of the most noteworthy circumstances connected with the revived art of fish-culture, that it has resulted in placing upon the shores of France upwards of 7000 fish-farms for the cultivation of the oyster alone.