Pearls
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 Ptolemy’s; 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. The luster
of pearls is nacreous, which means resembling mother-of-pearl, a luster due to
the minute undulations of the edges of alternate layers of carbonate of lime
and membrane. The luster of some pearls exists only on the surface; the outer
surface of others may be dull and the inner lustrous. The specific gravity of
the pearl is 2.5 to 2.7; hardness, 2.5 to 3.5. The shape varies and the range
of size and weight is great. The smallest pearl in commerce is less than the
head of a pin; the largest pearl known is in the Beresford Hope collection in
the Museum at South Kensington, London. Its length is two inches and
circumference four and a half inches. It weighs three ounces (1818 grains). Although
the whiteness of the pearl is constantly used for comparison, pearls range in color
from an opaque white through pink, yellow, salmon, fawn, purple, red, green,
brown, blue, black, and in fact every color and several shades of each; some
pearls are also iridescent. The color and luster are generally that of the
interior shell surface against which the pearl was formed. The beauty and value
of the pearl, in brief, depend upon color, texture, or “skin” transparency or “water,"
luster, and form; pearls most desired are round or pear-shaped, without blemish,
and having the highest degree of luster. The queen of existing pearls is La Pellegrino
now in the Museum of Zosima, Moscow, Russia. La Pellegrino is perfectly round
and of an unrivalled luster. It weighs 112 grains. While individual pearls or
strands of them may be worth a prince's ransom, their beauty and value are not immutable;
pearls may deteriorate with age or be sullied by the action of gases, vapors,
or acids, and the known methods for their restoration to their original appearance
and value are not always successful.
Fine pearls should be carefully wiped with a clean soft
cloth after they have been worn or exposed, and kept wrapped in a similar fabric
in a tightly closed casket. Pearls are found in nearly all bivalves with nacreous
shells, but the principal supply is derived from a comparatively few families,
led by the Aviculidae, Unionidse, and Mytilidse. The first group includes the pearl oyster of the Indian and Pacific
oceans, from which has come the bulk of the world's pearls; the second
includes the unio, or fresh water mussel
of North America; and the third is a family
of conchiferous molluscs, mostly marine(sea water), the typical
gems being Mytilius edulis, or true mussel, which has a wedge-shaped cell and
moors itself to piles and stones by a strong coarse byssus of flaxy or silky-looking
fibers. The distribution of these molluscs is world-wide. “In all ages, pearls
have been the social insignia of rank among the highly civilized," writes W.
R. Cattelle in his standard book The Pearl. First lavishly used by the princes
of the East for the adornment of their royal persons, as the course of empire
trended westward the pearl followed the flag of the conquerors, and thus, in
time, as Eome's power and affluence grew into world-control, her treasure of
pearls grew to vast proportions and became identified with the social eminence
and arrogance of the Caesars and patrician Rome. To-day the markets for the best in pearls of recent finding, as
for all new products of precious stones, or for famous jewels, whose owners’
changing fortunes bring them to the parting is within the new regime of Croesus
represented by the multimillionaires of the United States. The world's best
buyers of jewels are not always as willing to have their princely expenditures
known as is generally believed, and the names of some of America's heaviest
purchasers of gems have not been revealed by the dealers. It is authoritatively
stated that the finest single strand of large pearls in existence was recently
acquired by a Western millionaire of the United States. The strand is composed
of thirty-seven pearls ranging from eighteen to fifty-two and three quarter
grains each, the latter being the largest central pearl. The pearls combined
weigh 979% grains, and the strand is said to have cost its possessor $400,000.
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