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for pearls of rare size and beauty. Great leaders of men vied with each other in the effort to add to their collections. It is said that Julius Caesar's chief incentive for pushing his conquests into the west so far, was his desire to obtain the pearls to be found in the streams of the British Isles. The Emperor Caligula decked his favorite horse with a necklace of pearls. Pliny says of Lollia Paulina, Caligula's wife, that he had seen her so bedecked with pearls and precious stones that "she glittered and shone like the sun as she went." Clodius, the glutton, claiming for them a very delicate flavor, placed one by the plate of each guest at a great banquet to be mixed with the wine. This same profligate, either setting the example or emulating Cleopatra, swallowed in a cup of wine one worth eight thousand pounds that he might have the pleasure of consuming so much value at once.

If in the intrigues so common then, a woman's influence was required, pearls were given her. To convey an indirect bribe to a man of high station a pearl of great price was presented to a member of his family. Women wore them while they slept that they might possess them in their dreams; they hung them in loose clusters suspended from the ears, that the tinkling might remind them of the beauty they could not see, and to attract the admiration and envy of others. These were called "crotalia," meaning "rattles." Young men of fortune in Athens and Rome followed the Persian fashion of wearing one in the right ear, hung as a clapper in a small bell of metal. So strong and general did the desire to own them become that Caesar forbade unmarried women, and women under a certain rank, to wear them.

Perhaps never in the history of jewels has the vogue of one so nearly approached a frenzy as that of the pearl in Rome during her days of extreme power and grandeur. The high esteem in which it was held there is reflected in the Scriptures. The Saviour used it in His parables as a symbol. The gates of the Holy City, as the prophet John saw it in his vision, were pearls. From that time until now, writers have used pearls to symbolize purity, innocence and the highest type of feminine beauty. To say that a woman's teeth were like pearls has been the poets' favorite adulation, and the discovery and sale of great pearls has been deemed of sufficient importance by travellers and historians to record them.

Much of the literature of pearls is founded on the statements of Pliny regarding them: many, if not most, of the absurd beliefs as to their origin and superstitions concerning them, may be traced to the same source; and though these ancient errors have been repeatedly exposed by later scientists and naturalists the poetic absurdities of the industrious Roman compiler, gathered from contemporaneous writers and tradition are current to-day, for they appeal more to the child-like human love of the indefinite wonderful than the exact statements of research, though the latter are really more marvellous.

Though jewels are regarded by many as baubles and of little account among the great commercial interests of the world, they have been an important factor in shaping the destiny of nations, changing the borders of great countries and thereby aiding the progress of civilization. As pearls helped materially to bring Rome to the British Isles and the colonists of Spain to South America, so it is quite probable that the pearls of Egypt had their influence in drawing the Macedonians to that country, to be followed by the Romans when the latter sought to overturn the Macedonian empire. Beyond this, their influence among those who held the reins in the government of empires, or those having power with them that did, cannot be estimated.

Passing beyond the days of Greece and Rome to more remote times and countries, we come to the realms of conjecture. We know that pearls were known and used as jewels in Egypt under the Ptolemies. Chares of Mytilene mentioned that they were worn by women of the East about the neck and arms and even upon the feet. It is said there is a word for them in a Chinese dictionary four thousand years old.

There is evidence that they had been used in India and the far East long before the West had knowledge of those countries, but we have nothing recorded which penetrates the past beyond three to four hundred years B.C., for there is not as much mention made of them in ancient writings familiar to the West as of other precious stones. Nevertheless the pearl is among the most ancient in the nomenclature of jewels because when it did come to be written of only the one thing could be meant. Nature produces nothing similar with which it could be confounded, whereas it is not certain that the diamond, ruby, and other stones as we know them, were intended when the names by which we designate them were used. Such indiscriminate use of names has been made by translators that it is difficult to determine what the stones really were about which ancient authors wrote. The names of those in the Jewish High Priest's breastplate, given in our English version of the Old Testament, undoubtedly misrepresent the stones actually used, and the only thing authorities agree upon regarding the names is that they are incorrect.

After the same manner the last sentence, "For the price of wisdom is above rubies" is rendered by the great oriental scholar Bochart, "The extraction of wisdom is greater than the extraction of pearls," and other authorities agree with him.

Although there is evidence that many if not all the precious stones of to-day were known and used by the ancients, it is equally evident that they were much confounded and very roughly classified by general appearance only, and as various peoples gave them different names, all records of them are as misleading as the recorders were ignorant of their differential qualities. Even with the rapid increase of knowledge in the last few centuries, not until quite lately has science drawn the lines clearly between stones similar in appearance though essentially different and furnished means for the detection of those inherent differences. It is impossible therefore to learn by ancient writings how long any of the precious stones have been known and used as jewels, for we do not know positively what the stone was by the name given in old writings or by the translator of them. The pearl only has not been thus generally confounded with other gems.

Once only are pearls mentioned in the Old Testament--the instance quoted from the book of Job. It would seem therefore, that although used as jewels, they were not regarded as of great value in the East prior to about 400 years B.C., at which time the last of the sacred Jewish books is supposed to have been written. True, royalty wore them in Egypt and the people of Persia and Arabia used them very generally for personal adornment; but they were abundant in those countries and there had been no demand for them beyond their borders, therefore, though beautiful, they were common and not appreciated fully. Upon the influx of foreign invaders from shores that yielded no such gems their status changed rapidly. The greedy avidity with which Greeks and Romans seized them, and the demand for them from the West which came later, gave these natives of pearl-producing shores a new idea of the value of their pearls and the trinkets became gems.

It was a condition similar to that which arose nineteen hundred years later when the Spaniards invaded America. At their first coming the natives gave them freely large quantities of pearls and gleefully traded magnificent gems for broken pieces of gaudily painted and varnished porcelain. As one to-day might take a new acquaintance for a day's fishing to a well-stocked stream, so the Indians took the Spaniards to the pearl banks to show them how they obtained their pearls. With pleasure and probably some amusement, they watched the eagerness with which the strangers sought the pearls, and doubtless wondered at the gratification displayed when they found any.

The Egyptians and Asiatics being more highly civilized undoubtedly valued their pearls more than the South American Indians did, but naturally they would not appreciate them so highly as they did after foreign desire had depleted their hoards and established a constant demand for them, greater than the yield of their fisheries.

That a very considerable change in the world's estimate of the pearl took place during the four centuries B.C. is illustrated by the references made to pearls in the New Testament. Rome had made of the "white bones from a shell-fish" of the fourth century B.C., a gem for the rich and powerful and so generally established it in the public estimation that the sacred writers used it to illustrate their greatest conceptions of beauty and spiritual worth.

The Saviour likened the Kingdom of Heaven to "a pearl of great price:" under the similitude of pearls He counseled the reservation of holy things from men incapable of appreciating them. Paul and John numbered them among the costly adornments in the pride of life and with the most precious articles of merchandise. From that day, with the extension of commerce, and the growth of Western nations in affluence and refinement, the demand for pearls grew and spread until even the rude island of Britain learned to appreciate them.

The quantities of large and beautiful pearls stored in the treasure-houses of Hindu princes suggest that they have existed as jewels in India for a very long period, but for how many centuries cannot be definitely stated. The probability is that in very remote ages, rude fishermen of tropic seas all over the world, while fishing for food were attracted by the lustrous objects found occasionally in the oysters which they gathered and that they saved them as things likely to please some maid or matron of their affections. A favor for them once established, they would be sought, and with the growth of intelligence and refinement would come increased appreciation. There is a close analogy in all things between the development of the individual and nations, and even of the world. Each progresses on the same lines, the difference consists in the magnitude and duration of the processes only.

To the child, pearls are playthings; to youth, pretty baubles; to mature years, important gems; to age, most beautiful and wonderful creations, and the more intelligent and refined the individual, the more quickly are these stages of regard reached.

So probably, in countries where they were found, pearls have risen with the evolution of a great nation out of a primitive race, from the rude favor of toilers of the sea, to a high place in the esteem of the princes of a cultivated people. It is quite probable that when the Aryans from the north spread over India, they found pearls among the possessions of the natives of the Madras and Malabar coasts, if not of the interior and north, as Spain found them among the natives of South America. Having a higher order of intelligence, they would naturally estimate the gem as of greater value than the aborigines would.

As the invaders in the course of centuries gradually divided themselves into castes, the gem would come largely into the hands of the highest and its value would increase with the affluence of the ruling class, according to the ratio existing between their wealth and that of the average community; for the centralization of wealth establishes a price for its imperishable forms which debars the masses from ownership. So, probably, the Aryans from the north acquired the pearls they found in the possession of the Dasyus. When the shepherd invaders were settled in the territory they had conquered and became divided into castes of Vaisyas, Kshattriya and Brahman, pearls gravitated to the upper classes, to be garnered later by their princes as the government assumed a tyrannical form; and so it is that the great pearls of India found in ancient times are among the jewels of the princes of India, or of the Shah of Persia and the Afghan Ameers, who in turn looted some of the richest treasuries of India.

In countries east of India one can only imagine the history of pearls for there are no records of them. Year after year, for centuries and cycles, in undiscovered deeps, the beds of the sea were strewn with noble gems that through all their years of beauty lay neglected: the soft luster of succeeding charms appealed in vain for eyes which never came, and when the slow processes of time had brought decay they passed unseen to the catacombs of Nature.

So it was in many a tropic sea, on unknown shores and about islands holding strange creatures and stranger men. In the still, clear waters of far-away lagoons, treasures of pearls, released by the death of their creators, have rolled to a resting-place on coral reefs, to lie there until the sea, atom by atom, devoured them. Could all the pearls hoarded by every nation on earth be gathered together, the mighty sum would be small compared with the number of those which lie buried beneath the ocean.

But, one by one, slant-eyed Celestials, Maoris, Malays, Papuans, Polynesians and others, discovering, learned to prize and hoard the pearl. Then came men from far-off wonderlands, whose great ships spread their sails to the winds of the deep waters and who could endure for many days the solitudes of the great seas. These in the early days made war to plunder, but were replaced as the centuries passed, by others who gave gaudy beads and cloths of many colors and water that fired the soul and other wonderful things, in exchange for the white beads of the sea, and so the pearls of the unenlightened children of the South Seas passed to the princes of the West, even as the same restless spirits, spreading their sails to the winds of the great seas in the opposite direction, brought them east from more barbarous shores far away to the westward.

Our knowledge of pearls reaches back about twenty-three hundred years, through the writings of Pliny, who nearly nineteen hundred years ago gathered the facts of his day and the rumors of traditions concerning them. Beyond that we can only surmise that in prehistoric ages, with the dawn of intelligence in the infantile period of the race, men dwelling near tropic seas were attracted by them as children are by bright and pretty baubles; and that as humanity by families, tribes and nations, grew out of savagery to the mental stature of a man, so pearls grew to be jewels very precious.

THE FASHION OF PEARLS

Although the pearl like all other jewels, has had its periods of extreme and general public favor, unlike other gems if it is once appreciated by an individual or a nation it is never utterly discarded by either. If not the fashion, pearls are always in fashion. Far as we can look back among the dim, uncertain figures of the mystic past whose shades stand where the unknown multitudes have fallen, we find pearls.

The princes of India through all their generations, the dynasties of Egypt, the royalties of Persia, the wild chiefs of Arab tribes, the potentates of Greece, Rome and Venice, the houris of Turkey, the Queens of every European court, from the time they found a place in history until now, all wear pearls. At first thought this seems strange, for of all gems the origin of the pearl is most humble. No titanic forces, groaning in the travail of subterranean convulsions, crushed and ground and fired its particles to shape and beauty. It grew, a few fathoms deep, where the waters are at peace, in the embrace of a mollusk and out of its exudations.

From this lowly parentage it rises at once to a place among the noblest, for it is the aristocrat of gems and finds its warmest admirers among the aristocrats of all nations. The favorites of fortune the world over in all ages have succumbed to the modest beauty of the pearl. Its ascendancy marks not alone the refinement of the individuals with whom it finds favor, but the high status of the nation where it is widely appreciated. The pearl is the favorite of those who are surfeited with jewels. One may become tired of the diamond's splendor, but those who learn to appreciate the unobtrusive loveliness of the pearl, seldom lose that fondness for them which it develops. It is the one gem which does not satiate. The love of pearls usually marks a connoisseur of gems and one accustomed to the possession of jewels. Diamonds emblazon the gates of luxury but pearls are the familiars of the luxurious. Glittering gems are admired by all classes but usually the pearl is fully appreciated only by old countries and persons "to the manor born." It is in the treasure-houses of the princes of the Orient and among the jewels of great and noble families that one must look for the pearls gathered during the centuries. Except in Italy and Arabia, where all classes prize them, the pearl is not a jewel of the people, but of the gentry and the very rich who come in contact with them.

It is essentially a jewel for the wealthy. Unostentatious, exquisite, it is insufficient for those who have no other jewels and unfit for common wear. Of a nature too delicate for rough usage, it must be well cared for and properly housed. Even then the hand of time bears heavily upon it for it is susceptible to many influences which do not affect other gems. Comparatively soft, the lustrous skin is injured by rough and careless contact with other jewels. The gold of the setting, in time, cuts into the surface where it binds, or if it is pierced and strung, the rings of nacre about the orifices gradually peel away. Hot water injures it; gases discolor it. As the cheek of beauty grows dim with age, so gradually the brilliancy of youth fades from the pearl and the complexion of it is changed. And yet it retains a certain loveliness which may well be compared to the exquisite serenity with which the maturer years of some women are adorned.

The pearl, therefore, being essentially a jewel of the rich, is not affected as others by the whims of fashion. In Oriental countries, where the lives of the masses and what little property they hold are practically at the mercy of their rulers, the centuries make little change in conditions and less in fashions. The nobles have always possessed the jewels of the various eastern countries and the fashion continues through generations and dynasties, to accumulate and hold them until some stronger power takes them away by force. As the people hammered heavy bracelets and anklets out of the precious metals, not alone for display, but also to hoard them, so their princes hoarded jewels.

In the old times these hoards of the precious metals were periodically gathered by the requisitions of the princes on the people, and of jewels by the demands of a successful invader upon the princes; but while the possessors changed, the fashion remained always the same, and whether the Shah of Persia, the Ameer of Afghanistan, or the Mogul, there has been no variation in the constant desire to obtain more jewels, pearls among them, and to display them after the same fashion through all the generations.

To some extent this is true of pearls in the Occident also. Since Rome set the fashion there has not been a time in the history of any European nation, once it had risen to the pearl-wearing eminence, when the upper classes did not wear pearls. There is this difference between the East and the West however; whereas the men of the East wear them, in the West, pearls are worn almost entirely by women alone. The more rugged life of European men, the coarser fabrics of their garments to suit climatic needs, and their virile distaste for effeminate display, all combine to bar them from a jewel suited only to soft silks and linens or the touch of softer flesh.

In ancient times, among Asiatics, fashion probably did not culminate in any direction, as to-day, in a vogue. The inability of the masses to follow a fashion of the upper classes, both for lack of means and permission to do so; the absence of all rapid methods of communication between sections of country within and without national borders, with the consequent limitations of a knowledge of men and things to community affairs, and the paucity of manufacturing possibilities, all combined to make fashions permanent. With the awakening of the vigorous barbarian tribes of Europe to a knowledge of their power, and their rapid civilization, came the frenzied desire of men new to the situation, to crowd as much as possible into the span of life.

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.

It is noticeable, that in all the accounts given of the wealth of pearls discovered in the possession of the natives, the Spaniards rarely say anything about the shape or quality of the pearls seen or taken, but always mention the size when large. They do, however, constantly deplore the discoloration caused by the use of fire in the process of boring them. One may imagine the chagrin of these freebooters on finding heaps of royal gems wrecked by the ignorance of the plundered; the value burned out of them, like bank notes for millions mutilated beyond redemption. The pearls composing this five-foot string were all discolored,--good enough for Indians, but of little value in Spain and Europe.

Round baroques are strung for necklaces to this day, especially in Italy, where the peasantry save from their small earnings the equivalent of two to three hundred dollars, to them an enormous sum, to buy the coveted necklace of pearls. These necklaces are composed usually of several strands of small rounded baroques weighing about one to two grains each and connected by bars. Usually there are three to five strands, but some are made with as many as eleven or twelve. Necklaces are made also in the same way, of small round pearls, and the bars, of which there are generally four, including that containing the clasp, are studded with diamonds.

The Asiatics prefer strings of large pearls, graduating in size on either side from a large central one. A number of these of increasing length and fastened together at the clasp are worn by Oriental royalties, so that each string festoons below the preceding one, the lowest and longest string sometimes hanging to the waist. There are few however even among the Hindu princes whose store of large pearls is equal to such prodigality.

When pearl necklaces were adopted by the Romans after their conquests in Egypt, Persia and India, they vied with the monarchs they had conquered, some of their rulers acquiring pearls of enormous value. The wife of Caligula owned pearls worth two million dollars, but Oriental treasure-houses held greater accumulations. The pearls of the late Rana of Dholpur in Upper India, were valued at seven and a half million dollars. From Rome the fashion spread with the advance of civilization through all the nations of Europe and followed their colonizations westward. Only in the last decade has the use of pearls in the United States become sufficiently general to place them in the list of things that are a fashion.

Many large pearls of pear, egg, or drop shape, and some round, are used as pendants, to be hung on slender gold neck chains, or suspended from brooches of diamonds. They are bored at the smaller end to a depth of about one-eighth of an inch, the hole is filled with a composition which hardens rapidly, and in this a gold wire, looped at one end for connecting, is inserted. Formerly the pearl was drilled quite through and the suspending wire riveted, but this is rarely done now as it lessens the value of the pearl and destroys the perfect pendant effect. This is a European fashion. The Chinese mount pearls by boring into the body of the pearl at two, three or four points and inserting the bent ends of spreading wires so that the gem is clasped as by spreading finger tips.

Pear-shaped pearls were used in Rome for pendant purposes as now and were known as "elenchi." After the Roman fashion of "crotalia" or "castanet" eardrops had passed, drop pearls continued in more or less favor throughout succeeding centuries as eardrops, the matching of one nearly doubling the value of both. Of late, egg and pear-shaped pearls have been used largely as heads for scarf pins. They are drilled and set on a gold wire or "pegged" as it is called, in the manner described for pendants but with the smaller end resting upon a light gold ring soldered to the scarf pin, or in a small cup, so that the pressure, while inserting the pin, is distributed over the body of the pearl and upon the end, instead of upon the inner wall in contact with the end of the pin.

The Persians used pearls largely in the jewelling of royal headgear, for Pompey is said to have brought home twenty crowns of pearls with the loot from his eastern raid. Hindu princes strung them on straight wires of equal length and bound a number of them together, to be fastened as pompons or aigrettes, to their turbans. They encrusted and edged their robes with them as also did the royalties and nobles of Europe during the middle ages. Seed pearls were strung in lengths of four to six feet and the strands twisted together like a rope. This fashion continues to this day, such ropes of pearls sometimes measuring five feet in length.

The semi-barbarous Indian tribes of America did not confine the use of pearls altogether to personal adornment. They decorated their idols, state canoes, the handles of the paddles, and the figures in their temples with them, and they buried enormous quantities in the sepulchres with their dead. There is no evidence that this latter form of extravagance was at any time general in Asia or Europe, but Julius Caesar made a buckler of British pearls which he hung up in the temple of Venus Genetrix after dedicating it to her.

Among the ancients it does not appear that pearls were used in connection with the precious metals to a great extent. Collars of gold and silver with large pearls as pendants were sometimes seen upon the necks of Indians by the Spaniards when they landed on this continent, but in Asia, Africa, and upon their first introduction into Europe, pearls were not used with the metals as freely as other gems. As the art of the jeweller developed however, they came into more general use and are now utilized with gold in every form of jewelry. Round and button pearls with diamonds or other stones, or alone, are set in gold as brooches, ear-rings, finger-rings, bracelets, hair-ornaments, scarf-pins, dress-pins, studs, cuff and dress buttons, etc., and baroques are also used for the same purposes. Brooches, lockets and pendants are paved with solid masses of half pearls.

Some ancient swords of Hindu warriors betray a curious custom. A groove with over-lapping edges was sunk in the blade and into this pearls were introduced from the hilt end to represent the tears of enemies. There are blades so constructed in the collection of Indian swords presented to King Edward of England when, as the Prince of Wales, he visited India.

Jewellers frequently avail themselves of the odd shapes in which baroques occur to construct unique jewels. Nature frequently gives them a resemblance to animals, and sometimes to the human figure and face, which may be accentuated by the jeweller's art so as to make the resemblance striking. In one notable instance lately, a baroque was so mounted that it might easily pass as a modelled portrait of Queen Victoria. Baroques resembling bird's wings are common and are often made effective by mounting them on a bird of gold. Others remind one of fish, birds, insects, and beasts of various kinds. Clustered pearls enveloped together sometimes look like dog's heads, in which two of the enveloped pearls near the surface pass for eyes. Long, slender baroques are set to resemble the petals of a chrysanthemum, and others, mounted singly in sepals of gold, are suggestive of the buds of various flowers, roses, lilies, etc.

Round and button pearls are used extensively now, and have been at various periods formerly, as centres for circles, or "clusters" of diamonds mounted as scarf-pins, finger-rings and formerly, when they were worn, as ear-rings. The pearls are sometimes drilled and set on a peg; sometimes they are held by claws or prongs as the diamonds surrounding them are.

Pearls are very generally used now as studs by men for evening dress, usually mounted on pegs so as to avoid the display of any gold.

VARIETIES

In the early days pearls brought from the Orient were therefore called "Oriental" pearls. For the same reason the fine mellow luster which characterized and made them superior to others came to be known as the "orient" of the pearl. These pearls were taken from oysters found on the coasts of Ceylon, Arabia, and the Red Sea. Later, when the same kind of oysters containing similar pearls were found in other seas, they were also classified with them, until the term "oriental" is now applied usually to all true pearls taken from salt water mollusks, to distinguish them from those found in the fresh water mussels and other products of ocean shell-fish which, though similar in construction and composition, are not nacreous. Occasionally, however, the term is still applied specifically to pearls from the Indian Seas, though their "orient" or luster is not always finer than that of like pearls found in many other localities.

Pearl oysters are varieties of the Avicula Margaritifera, of which the Meleagrina Margaritifera is the most prolific of mother-of-pearl and pearls combined, and, the Indian excepted, yields the finest pearls. All pearl oysters do not produce sufficient mother-of-pearl to make their shells valuable, nor do they all contain pearls. The name therefore applies to all oysters whose secretions are productive, in some degree, of mother-of-pearl and therefore under favorable conditions of pearls also.

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