Читать книгу The Book of the Pearl. The history, art, science, and industry of the queen of gems онлайн

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In the first century A.D., Pliny wrote in his “Historia naturalis,” according to Dr. Philemon Holland’s quaint translation:

The fruit of these shell fishes are the Pearles, better or worse, great or small, according to the qualitie and quantitie of the dew which they received. For if the dew were pure and cleare which went into them, then are the Pearles white, faire, and Orient; but if grosse and troubled, the Pearles likewise are dimme, foule, and duskish; pale they are, if the weather were close, darke and threatening raine in the time of their conception. Whereby (no doubt) it is apparent and plaine, that they participate more of the aire and sky, than of the water and the sea; for according as the morning is faire, so are they cleere: but otherwise, if it were misty and cloudy, they also will be thicke and muddy in colour. If they may have their full time and season to feed, the Pearles likewise will thrive and grow bigge: but if in the time it chance to lighten, then they close their shells together, and for want of nourishment are kept hungrie and fasting, and so the pearles keepe at a stay and prosper not accordingly. But if it thunder withall, then suddenly they shut hard at once, and breed only those excrescences which be called Physemata, like unto bladders puft up and hooved with wind, no corporal substance at all: and these are the abortive & untimely fruits of these shell fishes.^[40]