thousand ducats. Now amongst the pearls
brought from the island there is one equal in size to an ordinary
nut. It was sold at auction and bought at Darien for twelve thousand
castellanos of gold, ending in the hands of the governor, Pedro Arias.
This precious pearl now belongs to his wife, of whom we have already
spoken at the time of his departure. We may assume, therefore, that
this pearl was the most precious of all, since it was valued so highly
amongst that mass of pearls which were bought, not singly, but by the
ounce. It is probable that the Venetian merchant had not paid such a
price in the East for the pearl of Pope Paul; but he lived at a time
when such objects were greedily sought and a lover of pearls was
waiting to swallow it.

Let us now say something of the shells in which pearls grow. Your
Beatitude is not ignorant of the fact that Aristotle, and Pliny who
followed the former in his theories, were not of the same opinion
concerning the growth of pearls. They held but one point in common,
and upon all others they differed. Neither would admit that pearl
oysters moved after they were once formed. They declare that there
exist at the bottom of the sea, meadows, as it were, upon which an
aromatic plant resembling thyme grows; they affirm they had seen these
fields. In such places these animals resembling oysters are born and
grow, engendering about them numerous progeny. They are not satisfied
to have one, three, four, or even more pearls, for as many as a
hundred and twenty pearls have been found in one shell on the
fisheries of that island; and the captain, Caspar Morales, and his
companions carefully counted them. While the Spaniards were there,
the cacique had his divers bring up pearls. The matrix of these pearl
oysters may be compared to the organ in which hens form their numerous
eggs. The pearls are produced in the following manner: as soon as they
are ripe and leave the womb of their mother, they are found detached
from the lips of the matrix. They follow one by one each in turn
detaching itself, after a brief interval. In the beginning the pearls
are enclosed, as it were, in the belly of the oyster, where they grow
just as a child while in the womb of its mother lives on the substance
of her body. Later on they leave the maternal asylum, where they were
hidden. The pearl oysters found--as I myself have seen from time to
time--upon the beach and imbedded in the sand on different Atlantic
coasts, ha