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1Author:  Brooks William Keith 1848-1908Add
 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.
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