The Pearl was sacred to the angel Gabriel and Monday was its special day of the week, the Moon was its planet and the zodiacal Cancer its sign. To dream of pearls is considered a favourable omen, being held to indicate wealth and honour gained by personal exertion. To the poor the pearl denotes riches. It is the symbol of happy marriage and popularity. That pearls are unfortunate is as untrue as that opals or any other gems are. That they are unfavourable to some is as true as that they are favourable to others, but prejudice being narrow and self-centred is hard to kill. A young lady of good family actually told the author that she would never wear pearls because she was unfortunate whenever she wore her necklace. Upon examining this terrible necklace the author saw that the alleged pearls were merely imitation! As imitation pearls scarcely come within the province of this book it may be sufficient to mention that in the year 1748 Linnaeus wrote to Dr. Haller, the physiologist, telling him that he had ascertained how pearls grow in shells. “I am able to produce in any mother of pearl shell that can be held in the hand, in the course of 4 or 5 years, a pearl as large as the seed of a common vetch.” This discovery by the great naturalist was regarded as of such importance by the Swedish Government that they ennobled Linnaeus, rewarded him with a gift of £450, and began to manufacture pearls under his direction with great secrecy. Linnaeus’ method had long been anticipated by the Chinese who used to throw pieces of mother of pearl, grit, etc., into the live oyster. It is said that in a year the coating over a piece of mother of pearl would be sufficient. Of late years the Japanese have acted on these practices with considerable skill, producing by mechanical means some beautiful specimens. Still, beautiful as they are, they are not _real_ pearls. A good deal of pearl “faking” is practised, and a short time ago a pearl broker in Paris was sentenced to imprisonment for tampering with the colour of a pearl. But whenever chemical means are employed in tinting a pearl the false colours invariably fade and leave the specimen worse off than before, more especially if a lady with a “good pearl skin” wears it. In his book on “Malay Magic,” Mr. W. W. Satek gives the following interesting account of Cocoa Nut Pearls, quoting from Dr. Deny’s “Descriptive Dictionary of British Malaya,” with acknowledgments to “Nature”:—