The River Earn
Photographs by The Raeburn Portrait Studio, Perth, Scotland
SCOTCH PEARL RIVERS
The British pearls are in great variety of colors, but most of them are practically valueless on account of the absence of orient or luster; for one possessing the white pearly luster, fifty may be found of a dull color and devoid of value. Many of these opaque pearls are dark, lusterless brown, and handfuls of them sell for only a few shillings. A large percentage are of a grayish or milky color, or of a bluish white tinge; these seldom attain much value unless aided by excellence of shape and purity of skin. A few are of a dark, fiery tint and of great luster. Sometimes the pearl is of a beautiful pink tint, sometimes of a light violet, or other exquisite shade. The fine pink ones are very rare and are highly prized. The best are those having the sweet, pure white light which constitutes the inimitable loveliness of a pearl; but few of them are found even in the most favorable seasons, and usually these are from the streams in the northeastern counties and some of the streams in the southwest. Very few combine the qualities of perfection in shape and luster; and the product of many seasons might be examined in vain to furnish enough pearls to make a well-matched necklace of gems weighing from five to ten grains each. But occasionally beautiful specimens are discovered, weighing fifteen or twenty grains or more. One found in Aberdeenshire a few years ago, perfect in shape and luster, weighed twenty-five grains, and sold at first hand for £50. Another one, found at the confluence of the Almond and the Tay in 1865, weighed thirty grains.
While most of these pearls are sold to jewelers in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Inverness, Perth, and other towns, many of the finest specimens have gone into the possession of prominent Scotch and English families, who have a fancy for collecting them. Queen Victoria possessed a fine collection of Scotch pearls, choice specimens of many years’ search, obtained almost exclusively from the Aberdeenshire waters which murmur round her beautiful Highland home. In 1907, a Scotch pearl was sold in Perth for the sum of £80; this was of a good luster with a bluish tint, it was spherical, measured seven sixteenths of an inch in diameter, and weighed twenty-one grains.
The falling off in the yield of pearls in some streams is credited to a certain extent to the building of bridges and the consequent abandonment of fords. This is based on the theory that injury to the mollusk has something to do with the production of pearls, and that they are to be found more plentiful about fords and places where cattle drink. The theory is beautifully stated by the lamented Hugh Miller: “I found occasion to conclude that the Unio of our river-fords secretes pearls so much more frequently than the Unionidae and Anadonta of our still pools and lakes, not from any specific peculiarity in the constitution of the creature, but from the effects of the habitat which it chooses. It receives in the fords and shallows of a rapid river many a rough blow from the sticks and pebbles carried down in time of flood, and occasionally from the feet of men and animals that cross the stream during droughts, and the blows induce the morbid secretions, of which pearls are the result. There seems to exist no inherent cause why Anadon cygnea, with its beautiful silvery nacre—as bright often, and always more delicate, than that of Unio margaritiferus—should not be equally productive of pearls; but secure from violence in its still pools and lakes, and unexposed to the circumstances that provoke abnormal secretions, it does not produce a single pearl for every hundred that are ripened into value and beauty by the exposed, current-tossed Unionidae of our rapid mountain rivers. Would that hardship and suffering bore always in a creature of a greatly higher family similar results, and that the hard buffets dealt him by fortune in the rough stream of life could be transmitted, by some blessed internal pre-disposition of his nature, into pearls of great price.”[[201]]
The small blue mussel (Mytilus edulis) of the British seas yields opaque pearls of a deep blue color, but most of them are more or less white in some part. Sometimes a shell is found in which a blue pearl will be adhering to the blue lip of the shell while a dull white one adheres to the white portion of the shell. These pearls are commonly flattened on one side, doubtless where they have been adjacent to the shell. None of them is of more than very slight value.
Probably the principal fishery for the salt-water mussel pearls is that in the estuary of the Conway in Wales. These are mostly quite small and well answer the designation of seed-pearls, although a few are of fair size. In color most of them range from dirty white to the dusky or brownish tint noted by Tacitus eighteen centuries ago, but a few are of a pure silvery tint. In some seasons London dealers have agents at Conway for purchasing these pearls. The price is usually from eight to thirty shillings per ounce.
THE CONTINENT OF EUROPE
Après l’esprit de discernement, ce qu’il y a au monde de plus rare, ce sont les diamants et les perles.
La Bruyère, Les caractères.