To exaggerate is a common tendency. Dealers usually place inordinately high figures on exceptional gems which they do for several reasons: the great price excites wonder and interest; it makes a large profit possible; it permits considerable reduction to a shrewd buyer; and it pleases the person who finally purchases it, for if the sale is made public the first asking price is usually given as the value of the jewel, and sometimes even that is exceeded. The buyer prefers to have it so because it increases the importance of his possession in the public mind and paves the way for a good price if he too at any time should wish to sell. One reads constantly in the daily papers of sales where the prices given are enormously beyond the sums actually paid, for the public like big figures. Reporters know this and do not fail to supply the demand. For instance: in an eastern city of the United States, a man while at a lunch counter found a pearl in the oyster he was eating. He took it at once to a jeweller of his acquaintance who handed it to a New York pearl-dealer present and asked him to value it. The pearl was large and round but, like all such formations in the edible oyster, quite devoid of the nacre which constitutes a true pearl. The dealer so informed them, adding casually, "If it were a true pearl it would be worth several thousand dollars." An evening paper that day had a half column story about it with, "A pearl worth five thousand dollars found in an oyster at a lunch-counter," in black head-lines, and the morning papers of the following day enlarged the story by adding fanciful details. Undoubtedly in the old days of license when immense fortunes were made not only in trade but by piratical wars, large prices were paid by fortune's favorites for pearls but it is extremely probable that report, bruited from mouth to mouth, exaggerated even more than the printed fables of our times do. It is doubtful if the pearls of ancient chronicles were as fine, judged by the standards of to-day, as we imagine or that all of them were as large as reported. The public were more ignorant about them than now and also more credulous and these invite exaggeration. Very large pearls which for perfection of shape, luster and freedom from flaws are beyond criticism, are the most rare of all gems. The conditions under which a pearl grows, makes large size, without the development of irregularities in the form and imperfections in the skin, almost impossible; and as they all grow in the same way, by the same process, out of the same sources of supply and subject to the same limitations, we find big and little, fine and ordinary, in about the same proportions as they occurred thousands of years ago; the fish that made them then makes them now, in the same kind of a narrow workshop and within the bounds of a life whose duration has not changed.