Rome rioted in the accumulations of ages. With an appetite whetted by an heredity of unsatisfied desire, she drank the finest vintages and gourmandized the choicest morsels of the world, immune from present punishment for excess by a long ancestry of hard and simple life. Every land that she could reach, sent to her the best of all their products, and from the incoming tide of things new to her experience, she adopted many fashions, among them that of wearing pearls. For several centuries they were in vogue, so much so that edicts were issued restricting them to certain classes. Since that time, the very general use of them by persons of high station in Europe, beyond all other gems, seems to have been confined to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is now being revived at the opening of the twentieth. There is one fashion of wearing pearls which is common to all ages and races, viz. strung as beads in chains to hang about the neck. The mound-builders of North America, the Indians of the Mississippi Valley, of Virginia, of the coasts of Florida, of the lands around the Gulf of Mexico and everywhere in New Spain, all wore them so. Egyptians, Persians, Arabians, Hindus, Singhalese and South Sea islanders, many of them without knowledge of countries or peoples beyond their own or very near territory, alike adopted this fashion. And it has been followed by every newer people, as they acquired by trade or the sword, the pearls with which to so adorn themselves. In lands of tropic heat the women wound these strings of pearls about their arms, wrists and ankles also. Nor was the fashion confined to women. When the Spaniards first reached these shores, the caciques of Florida and the incas of Peru, on occasions of State, wore ropes of pearls around their necks, and so to this day do the rajahs and princes of India and the eastern islands. The more civilized peoples used round pearls, and became more critical about the quality and perfection of the gems as they grew in wealth and refinement. The necklaces found in the Indian mounds are made principally of baroques, some of them rounded, but many of them long, slender pieces, bored a short distance from the thinner end, so that they hung in pendant festoons. As with all primitive races, the magnificence of size appealed to the Indians of this hemisphere, as it did also to the Spanish adventurers who first landed on the coasts of America. A chronicler of events during the time when De Soto was governor of the province which now forms several of the Southern States, mentions that a cacique brought as a present to the governor at the town of Ichiaha, a string of pearls as large as filberts, five feet long.