Aristocrat of Gems

In its purity, liquid beauty, and charm of romantic and poetical association the pearl—aristocrat of gems—leads even its peers of the highest rank, the diamond, emerald, ruby, and sapphire. The sea-gem has throughout all recorded time formed the fitting necklace of feminine royalty and famous beauty; the state decorations of dusky Oriental potentates and their principal treasures have been pearls. From the ocean's bed and the turgid streams of midland North America, from almost anywhere that is the habitat of the oyster or the humble mussel come these pale, lustrous treasures that may prove to be almost priceless. The existence and recognition of the beauty of the pearl as a personal ornament and treasure is undoubtedly prehistoric on every continent. The discoverers and conquistadores from old Spain found quantities of them in the western Indies, on the Spanish Main, in Florida, Mexico, and Peru; the mound-builders of North America possessed them; in the far East they were cherished centuries before the then Western world of Europe knew them; there is said to be a word meaning a pearl in a Chinese dictionary four thousand years old, and who knows how old is their presence in India.

Pearls were in the jewel caskets of Egypt's Ptolemies; and the first jewel mentioned in the most ancient decipherable and translatable writings extant is the pearl, and its identity is unquestioned, because the gem of the sea is solitary among jewels and is not to be confounded with the hard mineral gems which, even to-day, with all the advance in scientific knowledge, are constantly becoming mixed in the minds of men. From written records the modern ken of pearls extends back about twenty-three hundred years, and we hear of them in the writings of Pliny, the indefatigable investigator and disseminator of what he believed to be facts about almost everything in nature, who four hundred years later gathered together the knowledge of his day about pearls and included it in his voluminous literary grist.

In the technical literature of the United States National Museum, the pearl is coldly and remorselessly comprehended under the generic term "carbonate of lime" along with the beautiful but less valued coral, which is also a product of the sea; and marble, which concerns architects and sculptors, more than gem fanciers; and calcite and aragonite, which are varieties of satin spar and far down in the gem stone scale of hardness. It seems almost like desecration to reduce the lustrous pearl of peerless beauty and royal and romantic associations to the concrete mineralogical base of carbonate of lime; but thus are the insistent requirements of the mineralogists conserved. Therefore, pearls are concretions of carbonate of lime found in the shells of certain species of molluscs. An irritation of the animal's mantle promotes an abnormal secretory process, the cause of the irritation being the introduction into the shell of some minute foreign substance, sometimes a grain of sand.