CHAPTER II.

ANCIENT HISTORY OF THE OYSTER.

The Ancients; Oysters a Greek and Roman Luxury; Sergius Orata and the Oyster-beds of Baia; Immense Consumption at Rome; Failure of the Circean and Lucrinian Oyster-beds under Domitian, and Introduction of Rutupians from Britain; Agricola, Constantine, and Helena; Athenian Oysters and Aristides.

Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, Cicero and Seneca, Pliny, Ætius, and the old Greek doctor Oribasius, whom Julian the Apostate delighted to honour, and other men of taste amongst the ancients, have enlarged upon the various qualities of the oyster; and was it not to Sergius Orata that we owe our present oyster-beds; for he it was who introduced layers or stews for oysters at Baia, the Brighton of ancient Rome, as we have them at present. That was in the days when luxury was rampant, and when men of great wealth, like Licinius Crassus, the leviathan slave merchant, rose to the highest honours; for this dealer in human flesh in the boasted land of liberty, served the office of consul along with Pompey the Great, and on one occasion required no less than 10,000 tables to accommodate all his guests. How many barrels of oysters were eaten at that celebrated dinner, the "Ephemerides"—as Plutarch calls "The Times" and "Morning Post" of that day—have omitted to state; but as oysters then took the place that turtle-soup now does at our great City feeds, imagination may busy itself if it likes with the calculation. All we know is, that oysters then fetched very long prices at Rome, as the author of the "Tabella Cibaria" has not failed to tell us; and then, as now, the high price of any luxury of the table was sure to make a liberal supply of it necessary, when a man like Crassus entertained half the city as his guests, to rivet his popularity.

But the Romans had a weakness for the "breedy creatures," as our dear old friend Christopher North calls them in his inimitable "Noctes." In the time of Nero, some sixty years later, the consumption of oysters in the "Imperial City" was nearly as great as it now is in the "World’s Metropolis;" and there is a statement, which I recollect to have read somewhere, that during the reign of Domitian, the last of the twelve Cæsars, a greater number of millions of bushels were annually consumed at Rome than I should care to swear to. These oysters, however, were but Mediterranean produce—the small fry of Circe, and the smaller Lucrinians; and this unreasonable demand upon them quite exhausted the beds in that great fly-catcher’s reign; and it was not till under the wise administration of Agricola in Britain, when the Romans got their far-famed Rutupians from the shores of Kent, from Richborough and the Reculvers—the Rutupi Portus of the "Itinerary," of which the latter, the Regulbium, near Whitstable, in the mouth of the Thames, was the northern boundary—that Juvenal praised them as he does; and he was right: for in the whole world there are no oysters like them; and of all the "breedy creatures" that glide, or have ever glided down the throats of the human race, our "Natives" are probably the most delectable. Can we wonder, then, when Macrobius tells us that the Roman pontiffs in the fourth century never failed to have these Rutupians at table, particularly, feeling sure that Constantine the Great, and his mother, the pious Helena, must have carried their British tastes with them to Rome at that period.

The Greeks have not said much in praise of oysters; but then they knew nothing of Britain beyond its name, and looked upon it very much in the same light as we now regard the regions of the Esquimaux; and as to the little dabs of watery pulps found in the Mediterranean, what are they but oysters in name? Indeed, the best use the Athenians could make of them was to use their shells to ostracise any good citizen who, like Aristides, was too virtuous for a "Greek." However, on the plea that oysters are oysters, we presume—for it could not be on account of their flavour—"oysters," says the author of the "Tabella Cibaria," "were held in great esteem by the Athenians." No doubt when Constantine moved the seat of the Empire from Rome to Constantinople, he did not forget to have his Rutupians regularly forwarded; so, perhaps, after all it was our "Natives," which thus found their way into Greece, that they delighted in; and if so, the good taste of the Athenians need not be called into question; but, as in literature and the arts, in oyster-eating too, it deserves to be held up to commendation.

CHAPTER III.

MODERN HISTORY OF THE OYSTER.

Fall of the Rutupian Supremacy; Louis IV. and William of Normandy; Conquest of England, and Revival of Oyster-eating in England; The Oyster under Legal Protection; American Oysters.

With the fall of the Empire came also the fall of the Rutupian supremacy; and even the Roman Britons, driven into Brittany and the mountains of Wales by their truculent Saxon persecutors, had to forego these luxuries of the table, unless, perhaps, Prince Arthur and his knights may now and then have opened a bushel when they were seated over their wine in that free and easy circle, which has become so celebrated as to have formed a literature of its own. From the fourth century, to which Macrobius brought us, to the reign of Louis IV. of France, the history of the oyster is a blank; but that king revived the taste for our favourite, and during his captivity in Normandy brought it again into request with his conqueror, Duke William; so, when the Normans invaded England under William the Conqueror—the descendant of that Duke William, little more than a century later—they were not long in finding out how much Kentish and Essex oysters were preferable to those of France.

Since then the Oyster has held its own against all comers, as one of the most welcome accessories to the table of rich and poor, and has been protected in his rights and immunities by various Acts of Parliament. "In the month of May oysters cast their spawn," says an old writer in the "Transactions of the Royal Society," "which the dredgers call spat, and this spawn cleaves to stones, old oyster-shells, pieces of wood, and other substances at the bottom of the sea, which is called cultch. During that month, by the law of the Admiralty Court, the dredgers have liberty to take every kind of oyster, whatsoever be its size. When they have taken them they gently raise with a knife the small brood from the cultch, and then they throw the cultch in again, to preserve the ground for the future, unless they are so newly spat, that they cannot be safely severed from the cultch, in which case they are permitted to take the stone or shell, which the spat is upon, one shell having often twenty spats. After the month of May, it is felony to carry away the cultch, and punishable to take any other oysters except those of the size of a half-crown piece, or such as when the two shells are shut will admit of a shilling to rattle between them." These brood and other oysters are carried to creeks of the sea, and thrown into the channel, which are called their beds or layers, where they grow and fatten, and in two or three years oysters of the smallest brood reach the standard size.

The property in oyster beds is defined by the 7 & 8 George IV., c. 29, s. 36, which makes it larceny for any person to steal any oyster or oyster brood from any oyster bed belonging to another person, if such bed is sufficiently marked out and known as such; and even the attempt to take either oysters or oyster brood from such an oyster bed, though none be actually disturbed, is a misdemeanor, punishable by fine or imprisonment, or both, though nothing is to prevent the fishing for floating fish within the limits of any oyster fishery.

The Admiralty Court also imposes great penalties upon those who do not destroy a fish, which they call Fivefingers (the crossfish, or common starfish of our coasts), because it is supposed that that fish gets into the oysters when they gape, and sucks them out. That it is injurious to oyster beds may be true; for its food, in part, consists of mollusks. It does not, however, walk into the oyster bodily, as the Admiralty Court suggests, but rather appears to overpower its prey by applying some poisonous secretion, and pouting out the lobes of the stomach, so as to convert them into a kind of proboscis, and thus suck the mollusks from their shells.

The reason of the penalty for destroying the cultch is that the ouse then will increase, and mussels and cockles will breed there and destroy the oysters, because they have no convenience for depositing their spat. Hence, mud and sea-weeds are extremely injurious to the "breedy creatures'" propagation and increase; for no less than starfish, cockles, and mussels, other enemies amongst shellfish and crustaceous animals, particularly crabs and scollops, eagerly devour the oyster, when they can capture it.

In America, where the quality of the native oyster, though little inferior to the larger species of Britain, is greatly over-rated, the legislature is now called upon to make a similar provision for its protection against its greatest enemy, man. "It has been estimated," says a correspondent in No. 769 of the "Family Herald," "that the State of Virginia possesses an area of about 1,680,000 acres of oyster beds, containing about 784,000,000 bushels of oysters. It is also stated that the mother oyster spawns annually at least 3,000,000; yet, notwithstanding this enormous productive power, and the vast extent of oyster beds, there is danger of the oyster being exterminated unless measures are adopted to prevent fishermen from taking them at improper seasons of the year. It is therefore proposed to have either a flotilla of four steamboats employed to protect the oyster beds from piratical intruders, or to farm out the oyster beds to private contractors to do with them as they please."

CHAPTER IV.

THE OYSTER AT HOME.

Its Nature, Colour, and Structure; Natural Food; Perception of the changes of Light; Uses of the Cilia; Fecundity and Means of Propagation; Age; Fossil Oysters in Berkshire and in the Pacific; Power of Locomotion.

The Oyster belongs to those Mollusks which are headless, having their gills in the form of membranous plates, and are named Lamellibranchiata, from the Latin word Lamella, a plate; or Conchæ, the Latin name for the whole family of oyster, scollop, cockle, mussel, and other well-known bivalves. Properly speaking, only six kinds are fit to take part in the gastromal treat, to say nothing of the sanitary advantages the family are good enough to provide for the world at large. These six peculiar and most agreeable aristocrats all belong to the family of the common oyster, Ostrea edulis, by far the most important tribe, and in fact, that in behalf of whose meritorious qualities I have more particularly taken up my pen.

The oyster bears different names in accordance to the localities in which it is found, whether on rocky ground, mud, or sand, and has different colours in different places. In Spain, oysters are found of a red and russet colour; in Illyria they are brown, but the fish is black, and in the Red Sea, of the colours of the rainbow. The green oyster, the Parisian delicacy, is brought from Brittany; but the same flavour and colour can be produced by putting oysters into pits where the water is about three feet deep in the salt marshes, and where the sun has great power. In these they become green in three or four days; for these colours are derived from the elementary substance on which they feed; not, however, that it produces any peculiar difference as to flavour. I may, however, as well decide at once that the green oyster is, to my taste, the oyster par excellence, in which decision I shall doubtless be borne out by most gourmets whose knowledge extends to a choice of the good things of this life.

I know, in this, some of my friends north of the Tweed may differ, and, if still living, amongst them I should have had to include Professor Wilson, so long the very life and soul of oyster-suppers and whisky-toddy. But nobody can judge of the true flavour of an oyster without well masticating his delicious food; and, by his own showing, both he and the "Shepherd" bolted their "Pandores." These same "Pandores," by the way, are large fat oysters, much relished in modern Athens, which are said to owe their superior excellence to the brackish contents of the pans of the adjacent salt-works of Prestonpans flowing out upon the beds. Taken away young and transferred to the Ostend beds, these Pandores furnish the very best oysters to be met with on the Continent, surpassing even the far-famed ones of Flensburg, in Holstein. Had "Christopher North" tickled the fish first to death with his incisors before he swallowed it, I might have submitted my judgment to his; but how can a man who bolted his food be quoted as an authority in matters of taste? At best, his must have been but an after-taste, a mere bilious reminder of what the repast had been, in which the whisky played as prominent a part as the "breedy creatures" themselves.

But let us return. The lower shell (*) of the oyster is concave, the upper flat. These shells are opened and closed by the medium of a strong muscle acting upon a hinge (+), far more complete in its structure than ever locksmith could produce, even at the forthcoming Exhibition of all Nations.

On the outside of the shell, when placed in a dark place, we may often observe a shining matter of blueish light, like a flame of brimstone, which sticks to the fingers when touched, and continues shining and giving light for a considerable time, though without any sensible heat. This light is produced by three varieties of minute animalcules, most interesting when examined under the microscope.

The oyster possesses an organ of respiration similar to that of a fish—branchiæ or gills, in fact (br), which are fringed by a mantle or beard divided into two lobes (m), filled up by small membranous fibres which terminate in the mouth (b), in the form of rays, serving the animal also with power to catch and eat. Unlike other shelled mussels the oyster has no feet; thus it is unable to make any other voluntary movement, save that of opening and closing its shell, as already named, in order to receive its food, which consists principally of small microscopical spores and young shoots of marine plants, made soft and thin by the action of the waves; whence arise the green beards or mantles. With some difficulty I have been enabled to separate a small portion of this vegetation from the mantle of an oyster, and having placed it under a strong microscope, discovered sea weed, of precisely the same species as that in which oysters are packed. They also feed on an infusion of sea worms called oyster animalcules. These are very accurately described in the "Journal des Savans," by M. Auzout. Some are irridescent, but others are not, and good specimens of all may be secured immediately the oyster has been taken from the sea.