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.