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Wonders of the Sea: Oyster-Eater

The Oyster. "Seating himself, he gazes upon the calm expanse beyond, and swings his legs against the moss that spins its filmy tendrils in the brine. Suddenly he utters a Mankind appear at an early date to have been acquainted with the delicious cry, springs up, the blood streaming from flavor of the Oyster. Mr. Cozzens sug- his foot. With barbarous fury he tears gests the probability that although Adam up masses of sea-moss, and with it cluswas the great name-giver of early times, tering families of testacea. Dashing inasmuch as he lived inland, he "never them down upon the rock, he perceives a saw the succulent periphery in its native liquor exuding from the fragments; he mud; we may deduce the following rea- sees the white, pulpy, delicate morsel sonable conclusion, viz: that as he never half hidden in the cracked shell, and insaw it, he probably never named it-no, stinctively reaching upward, his hand not to his most intimate friends." In finds his mouth, and amid a savage, tracing the history of the Oyster in con- triumphant deglutition, he murmurs nection with mankind, this author seems Oyster! Champing in his uncouth fashion to have come to the conclusion that its bits of shell and sea-weed with unconmerits were first discovered in Great trollable pleasure, he masters this mystery Britain an idea perhaps suggested by of a new sensation, and not until the gray the well-known fact that British Oysters, veil of night is drawn over the distant even so far back as the time of the early waters, does he leave the rock, covered emperors, were renowned among the epicures of Rome. The precise details of the discovery are given by this fanciful and humorous writer as follows: with the trophies of his victory. "We date from this epoch the Maritime History of England. Ere long the reedy cabins of her aborigines clustered upon "Methinks I see the First Oyster-Eater! the banks of beautiful inlets, and overa brawny, naked savage, with his wild spread her long lines of level beaches, or hair matted over his wild eyes, a zodiac pencilled with delicate wreaths of smoke of fiery stars tattooed across his muscular the savage aspect of her rocky coasts. breast; unclad, unsandaled, hirsute and The sword was beaten into the oysterhungry, he breaks through the under- knife, and the spear into oyster-rakes. woods that margin the beach, and stands Commerce spread her white wings along alone upon the sea-shore, with nothing in the shores of happy Albion, and man one hand but his unsuccessful boar-spear, emerged at once into civilization from a and nothing in the other but his fist. nomadic state. From this people arose There he beholds a splendid panorama! the mighty nation of Ostragoths; from The West all aglow, the conscious waves the Ostraphagi of ancient Britain came C.GVSS