All these hollow glass beads, have one or two holes. They are coated on the inside with fish-scale solution and filled with wax. Some are treated with acid or sand-blasted to tone down the shiny, glassy appearing surface, and to hide the blow-holes in the glass. The effect is quite pearly, but the color is somewhat darker and they show some iridescence. Without the surface treatment they are more shiny and under the loup one will discover the small blow-holes peculiar to surfaces which have been molten.
The rims of the holes have a smooth, rounded, congealed appearance, whereas holes in pearls have a rough, square, chalky edge. On looking diagonally into the hole of a glass bead, the glass will appear as a dark ring against the wax filling, and where there are two holes, one will almost invariably have a ring in the glass, a short distance from and around it. The surface over the ring is smooth, though it looks as if it were ridged; the ring is in the glass, not on it.
These hollow-blown glass pearls are lighter than the real pearls also. There is one never failing test however which discovers even the best of these most dangerous imitations. Drop a small spot of ink from the point of a pen upon one, and hold it between the eye and the light, when two spots will appear, the one nearest to the eye being a reflection from the inner wall of the glass resting against the wax, of the actual ink spot on the surface. The duplicate spot will be lighter in color than the original. On a real pearl there would be no such reflection, nor would it appear on a solid bead imitation, but as before stated, the weight of the latter betrays them, as they are heavier than the real, nor do they look as pearly, and on holding them between the eye and light they do not show the translucency at the edge of the circumference peculiar in a more or less degree, to the gem.
FACTS AND FANCIES
In ancient days there was a belief in the east that at the full of the moon the pearl-oyster rose to the surface of the sea and opened its shell to receive the falling dew-drops. These congealing, hardened into pearls. Similarly, the natives of India believed that Buddha in certain months showered upon the earth, dew-drops from heaven, which the oyster, floating on the waters to breathe, received and held until they hardened and became pearls. These poetical imaginations of the Orientals were carried west with the pearls. Poets embodied them in verse. Prose writers, losing the poetry of the fable, trimmed them to the bare statements of impossible facts. An English writer early in the eighteenth century speaking of the mussels in the streams of northern England said that "gaping eagerly and sucking in their dewy streams they did conceive and bring forth a great plenty of pearls."
Later writers also attributed the origin of pearls to the reception of raindrops from heaven by the oyster, and one gravely asserted that the fishermen always found more pearls after a season of heavy rains. He did not state that the oysters rose to the surface of the sea to receive the raindrops, neither did he explain how these drops from heaven passed through the brine to the oyster inviolate. Pliny was more definite; he stated that the quality of the pearls varied with that of the dew from which they were formed and were clear or turbid as it was. The pearl would be pale-colored if the weather was cloudy when the dew fell into the shell, and large if the dew was plentiful. Thunder during the reception of the drop resulted in a hollow pearl and if lightning caused the shell to close suddenly the pearl would be small.
The people of Java and Borneo had a belief which should have been yet more difficult to acquire. They asserted that the pearls themselves breed and increase in number if placed in cotton. Clusters of twinned pearls were said to be produced thus, and it is related that some had the audacity to sell breeding pearls claiming to distinguish the male from the female. This fable also travelled west and was received by the credulous. M. S. Lovell in his "Edible Mollusks" says, "A Spanish lady informed a friend of mine that if seed-pearls were shut up in cotton-wool they would increase either in size or in number."
To this day the ancient superstition, or belief, is believed not only by sea-board Malays, but by Europeans, and there are those who claim to own breeding pearls and to have bred from them. The pearls are placed in a box with a layer of cotton-seed and a few grains of rice, under and over them. The box is then closed and in a year, if one account given is a fair statement of average results, one may look for a four-fold increase, though the children will not be as large as the parents. Some of them may be as large as a pin head. The rice will look crumbly and worm-eaten.