impress us with the latter, as to the greatness of the subject itself. It is a great pity that so few missionaries, teachers, and catechists, male or female, know how to describe their work and their pupils, and that they do not make it a study to learn how do this as a part of their duty; for vivid, natural, and simple description of facts, of the manner of life they lead, and of the people among whom they labour, would forward the work exceedingly, and induce many who now regard it with distaste, to study it eagerly. The precious letters and journals sent off, perhaps once a month, or it may be once a year, are often more full of the missionaries' or catechists' feelings, and his pious trust in God under his discouragements, than of the events which discouraged, or the success which caused those feelings; and as long as this is the case we shall greatly need such writers as the author of the present book, and others like her, to weed the missionary field for us, and to dig, and gather, and sort, and put into shape, the information that pours in from the end of the earth, in a state of chaotic confusion. "Oshielle" is well worth reading, though not faultless in point of arrangement. It conveys a great deal of interesting information, but only one little fact that can at present be mentioned here; which is, that the expense of educating a child in its school is £3 a year. Many of the children in the West African school have been rescued from slave dealers, and some have parents now in a state of slavery; and all are in need of assistance, and grateful for it when obtained.*

"Sketches of a Tour in Egypt and Palestine" may be very interesting to the friends for whom they were written, but they scarcely merit the attention of the reading world at large.

The Editor has requested me to mention the "Almanac of the Young Women's Christian Association" in order to draw attention to the Society from which it emanates, which is formed upon the model of the Young Men's Christian Association, and will, it may be hoped, be equally useful. office is at 35, New Bridge-street, Blackfriars-bridge.

Its

If the readers of the YOUTH'S MAGAZINE would like to have a pupil educated in these West African schools, they may send postage stamps, under cover, to the Editor, and they shall be duly forwarded and acknowledged. No one is to send without a name or initial, by which the contribution can be acknowledged. Each child, when placed at a school, has a name chosen for it by its benefactors, generally the name of some well-known missionary or female teacher; each subscriber will, therefore, choose some very well-known name, and the name which has the majority of votes shall have the pre

ference.

THE value attached to pearls may be considered as a proof of what an unreasonable creature man is; or it may be considered, on the other hand, as a proof that man is a reasonable creature!

An unreasonable creature to love a beautiful little thing, not so large as a pea; that can neither feed him when he is hungry, nor cure him when he is sick, nor clothe him when he is cold, nor sing to him when he is sorrowful: just a little white bead, not transparent, nor yet quite opaque, with a glimmering lustre in it that changes while its wearer breathes; and has no merit in the world but the merit of making lovely things look more fair; that answers to no want in the heart, but the desire (not universally shared) to contemplate beauty; and could command no price in the market unless it was rare.

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But then it must be agreed, that none but reasonable creatures are conscious of such a quality as beauty; the oxen feeding in an upland pasture never stop to contemplate the view; the sheep on the clearest night never lie awake to stare at the stars. As for rarity, if the rarest of British ferns, a plant so rare and so nearly exterminated, that the very last living example of it should be growing close under the eyes of some old cow as she chewed the cud, and if that experienced animal could observe the fact, that she had never seen a leaf with just those slashes and those wrinkles in its crumpled form before, she would not, on that account, spare to tread it down, and annihilate it when she rose. Not at all, and that no doubt is the reason why we have lost some priceless things, which if cows only knew what rareness means might still have been spared; but let our dear friends, the fern collectors, though they grieve over the stupidity of the lower creation, rejoice in the recollection that cows and quadrupeds in general never eat ferns, they do not search them out as delicacies, but only despise them as growing things that are not meat, relics of an age when there were no quadrupeds, and when, as might be expected from the fitness and harmony of all the works of the great Creator, there was no green thing which a quadruped could eat.

According to Bingley, the pearl muscle, or pearl oyster (Avicula Margaritifera), to which we are indebted for nearly all the pearls of commerce, has a flattened and somewhat circular shell, about eight inches in diameter; the part near the hinge bent or transversed, and imbricated (or covered like slates on a house), with several coats which are toothed at the edges. Some of the shells are externally of a green colour; others are chestnut, or reddish with white stripes or marks; and others whitish with green marks.

These shells are found both in the American and

Indian seas. From other authorities, we learn that considerable quantities of pearls have, in modern times, been furnished from Scotland; and that for several successive years, about the middle of the last century, the rivers of Perthshire supplied to the London market pearls to the amount of £10,000.

Eighteen hundred years ago, the pearl fisheries of Ceylon were described by Pliny; and these most probably are the same which exist there to this day, and supply the majority of the pearls worn in Europe. But Pliny, in matters which concern the observations of nature, may fairly be set aside. Those poor ancients, though they could build and carve, had not attained to the art of sticking butterflies on pins, and finding out, through a magnifying glass, how many lenses there are in their eyes. Neptune might disturb great Uranus in his orbit with impunity, and make his moons rock in their courses, it was nothing to them who had never surmised the existence of either planet; and who expected to be set on fire by every comet's tail that swept near them. And then as to bones—if an ancient philosopher found in a mine or a cavern, the bones of animals which lived when the world was young, he did not know anything about them, not even whether they were the bones of a beast or of a bird.

But to return to the notions of Pliny respecting pearls. "Pearls," he informs us, are made of dew drops; the fish rises to the surface of the sea in the month of May, and swallows a dew drop; this is the germ of a pearl." He says, "These pearls differ according to the quality of the dew by which they are formed; if that be clear they will also be clear, but if turbid then they are turbid; if the weather be cloudy when the precious drop falls into the shell, the pearl will be pale-coloured; if the shell has received a full supply, the pearl will be large; but lightning may cause it to shut too suddenly, and then the pearl will

be very small; when it thunders while the drop falls, the pearl will be a mere hollow shell of no consistency. This information, if it is authentic, must surely have been derived from the oyster itself, it is so minute and circumstantial, that it could only have come from head quarters.

If any circumstance was wanting in the chain of evidence, which goes to prove that Cleopatra the luxurious queen of Egypt-the serpent of old Nilehad a common and vulgar mind, it is supplied by the fact, that she dissolved and drank the exquisite pearls; this was, perhaps, one of the most vulgar things that ever was done; the wilful and ostentatious destruction of beautiful and rare objects, in order to show, according to the common English expression, that "money was no object."

Jeffries, a celebrated jeweller, decides that pearls should be either globular, or pear shaped, and that a pearl of one carat (three grains and one-fifth) is worth eight shillings; one of two carats, four times that amount; one of three carats, nine times, and so on in an equal proportion; but the price set upon pearls of unusual dimensions exceeds this estimate enormously; and pearls of extraordinary size receive a valuation upon other grounds than their weight.

The pearl which is generally considered to be the most beautiful in the world, weighs nearly twentyeight carats. It is kept in the Museum of Zosima, in Moscow. It is described as being "perfectly globular, and so beautifully brilliant that at first sight it appears transparent." It was bought by Zosima at Leghorn, of a captain of an East Indian ship, and is known as the Pellegrina.

The actual marketable value of this pearl is not known; but one which was not nearly so fine was bought by Pope Leo X. of a Venetian jeweller, for the sum of £14,000; and the great pearl belonging to the Shah of Persia, which was seen by Tavernius, in 1633,