Oyster‐fishing is pursued in many different ways in different countries. Round Minorca, divers descend, hammer in hand, and bring up as many as they can carry. On the English and French coasts a most destructive process is employed; a dredge‐net, heavily weighted with an iron frame, is thrown overboard; it tears off a number of the precious bivalves from the bottom, and leaves a larger number buried in the mud. “In France,” says Figuier, “oyster‐dredging is conducted by fleets of thirty or forty boats, each carrying four or five men. At a fixed hour, and under the surveillance of a coastguard in a pinnace bearing the national flag, the flotilla commences the fishing. In the estuary of the Thames the practice is much the same, although no official surveillance is observed. Each bark is provided with four or five dredges, each resembling in shape a common clasp purse. These dredges are formed of network, with a strong iron frame, the iron frame serving the double purpose of acting as a scraper and keeping the mouth open, while giving a proper pressure as it travels over the oyster‐beds.... The tension of the rope is the signal for hauling in, and very heterogeneous are the contents of the dredge—seaweeds, star‐ fishes, lobsters, crabs, actinia, and stones. In this manner the common oyster‐beds on both sides of the Channel were ploughed up by the oyster‐ dredger pretty much as the ploughman on shore turns up a field.” The consequence was that the fields became nearly exhausted. This led to the scientific cultivation now in vogue, which has proved most thoroughly successful in a commercial point of view. In Italy, the Neapolitan Lake Fusaro—the Acheron of so many of the classical poets—is a great oyster‐park, dating from the days of the Romans. It is a salt, marshy pond, shaded by magnificent trees; its greatest depth is nowhere more than six feet; its bottom is black, the mud being of volcanic origin. The general idea involved in the oyster cultivation there is the protection of the embryo oyster. The fishermen of Lake Fusaro warehouse, as it were, in protected spots, the oysters ready to discharge the spawn or spat. Upon the bottom of the lake, and all around it, there are round pyramidal heaps of stones and artificial rockeries, surrounded by piles. Other piles have lines suspended from one to the other, each cord bearing a faggot or faggots of young branches and twigs. In the spawning season the young fry, issuing from the parents on the stones or rocks, are arrested by these means. They have, as it were, a resting‐place provided for them on the piles and faggots.