| | 1 | Author: | Brooks
William Keith
1848-1908 | Add | | | Title: | The Oyster  | | | | Published: | 2003 | | | | Subjects: | University of Virginia Library, Modern English collection | UVA-LIB-Text | | | | Description: | A citizen of Maryland will give the oyster a high
place in the list of our resources. The vast number
of oysters which the Chesapeake Bay has furnished in
the past is ample proof of its fertility, but it is difficult
to give any definite statement as to its value. Statistics,
even in recent years, are scanty and doubtful, and
it is not possible to estimate the number of oysters
which our beds have furnished to our people with any
accuracy, although it may be computed, approximately,
from indirect evidence. The business of
packing oysters for shipment to the interior was established
in Maryland in 1834, and from that date to
quite recent years it has grown steadily and constantly,
and, though small and insignificant at first, it
has kept pace with the development of our country,
the growth of our population, and the improvement
of means for transportation. For fifty-six years the
bay has furnished the oysters to meet this constantly
increasing demand. The middle of this period is the
year 1862, and as the greatest development of the
business has taken place since, the business of 1862
may be used as an average for the whole period,
with little danger of error through excess. We have
no statistics for 1862, but in 1865 C. S. Maltby made
a very careful computation of the oyster business of
the whole bay for the year. He says there were 1000
boats engaged in dredging and 1500 canoes engaged
in tonging. The dredgers gathered 3,663,125 bushels
of oysters in Maryland and 1,083,209 bushels in Virginia,
while 1,216,375 bushels were tonged in Maryland
and 981,791 bushels in Virginia, or 6,954,500 bushels
in all. About half of these were sent to Baltimore,
and the rest to the following cities in the following
order: Washington, Alexandria, Boston, Fair Haven,
New York, Philadelphia, Seaford, and Salisbury. Of
the 3,465,000 bushels which came to Baltimore, 625,000;
were consumed in the city and its vicinity, while
2,840,000 bushels were shipped to a distance by Baltimore
packers. Ten years later the harvest of oysters
from the bay had increased to 17,000,000 bushels,
and it has continued to increase, year after year, up
to the last few years. We may safely regard the
harvest of 1865 as an approximation to the annual
average for the whole period of fifty-six years, and
other methods of computation give essentially the
same result. Figure 1. The left side of an oyster lying in one
shell, with the other shell removed. The mantle has
been turned back a little, to show its fringe of dark-colored
tentacles, and in order to expose the gills.
The part of the mantle which is turned back in this
figure marks the place where the current of water
flows in to the gills. An oyster in the right valve of the shell, dissected
so as to show the internal organs. The anterior end
of the body is at the top of the figure, and the dorsal
surface on the right hand. Figure 1. A diagram to show the double-w-like
arrangement of the eight leaves forming the four gills.
The gill-chamber of the mantle is supposed to be on
the right and the cloacal chamber on the left. w is
the opening of a water tube. All the figures are highly magnified and all except
Figure 10 are autograph reproductions from the
author's drawings from nature. Figure 10 is copied
from a figure by R. T. Jackson in the American
Naturalist, December, 1890. Oysters fastened to the upper surface of a round
boulder, which had formed the ballast of some vessel
and had been thrown overboard in the bay, where the
lower half had become embedded in the bottom. The
figure, which is about one-fourth the size of the specimen,
shows the way in which the oysters grow, in
dense crowded clusters, on any solid body which raises
them above the mud. An old shoe, one-fourth natural size, upon which
there are forty oysters, large enough to be marketable,
besides a great number of smaller ones. Figure 2. An oyster shell upon the inside of
which about one hundred and fifty young oysters have
fastened themselves. This is one from the lot of shells
which were sold by Mr. Church, of Crisfield, from the
pile of shells at his packing-house, to an oyster farmer
in Long Island Sound. Mr. Church visited the farm
five weeks after the shells were shipped, and took up
a number of the shells, and he states that the one
which is here figured is a fair sample. (Tiles which were deposited in the Little Annamessex River
by Lieut. Francis Winslow, U. S. N., on July 9, 1879, for the
collection of oyster spat. From Winslow's Report on the Oyster
Beds of Tangier and Pokamoke Sounds.) Spat six weeks old, from a floating collector. | | | Similar Items: | Find |
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