Pearls are of remote antiquity. In the time of Pliny they held the highest rank among all gems, and the Romans esteemed and largely used them—the ladies ornamenting, with lavish extravagance, all parts of their dress with them; and so extravagant did they become in their use of these gems by way of personal ornament, that Seneca, the wise moralist, reproaches a patrician by saying that his lady wore all the wealth of his house in her ears, it being at that time the fashion for a lady to have three or four of these valuable gems hung in each ear-drop. As to the value of these drops from the deep, we may instance Cleopatra’s banquet to Mark Antony, when, according to vulgar belief, she took a pearl from her ear, worth £80,000 of our money, and dissolving it in vinegar, swallowed it! The pearl which Cæsar presented to the mother of Marcus Brutus is said to have been of the value of £48,000. Then we are told that Clodius, the son of the tragedian, once swallowed a pearl worth £8000. Actors’ sons of the present day have been known to do extravagant things; but few of them, I suspect, could achieve a feat like this. In the East, too, in those early days, the pearl was held in the highest esteem. We read of one gem, still to be seen in Persia, I believe, that had a market price set upon it equal to £100,000 of our money; and there is another pearl mentioned as obtained in 1587 from the island of Margarita which weighed 250 carats, the value of which was named as being $150,000; and there are many other instances on record of the value of pearls to which I need not make further reference. When our government took up the Eastern pearl-fishery in 1797, the annual produce was £144,000, which in the following year was increased by £50,000, but immediately afterwards fell off, most probably from overfishing. It revived again, and in the beginning of the present century the pearl ground was leased to private adventurers at the large rent of £120,000 per annum, with the wise understanding that the bed or bank was to be divided into portions, only one of which was to be worked at a time, so that a part of the mussels might have a good rest. From various causes, however, the Ceylon fisheries have again failed, and for a year or two have been totally unproductive. In a privately-printed work on Ceylon, by James Steuart, Esq. of Colpetty, which the author has kindly forwarded to me along with a quantity of Oriental pearl-oyster shells, there is a very interesting description of the Ceylon pearl-fishery, with notes on the natural history of the oyster. In reference to the recent failure of the fishery for gems in the Gulf of Manaar, Mr. Steuart has supplied me with the following interesting note:—