Flatsmen.

No fishermen, not members of the Whitstable Oyster Fishery Company before the Act of 1896, are permitted to work on the Company's ground, but there is a large body of men called flatsmen, not heing members of the Company, who obtain a comfortable living by dredging for brood, halfware and ware, and selling them to the company at a price fixed by those purchasers. These flatsmen can, of course, only dredge over the public fishing grounds, to which the free dredgers also resort for the same purpose. Of the flatsmen it may be truly said all is fish that comes to their nets, for, at the proper seasons, they dredge also for five-fingers, mussels, whelks, and cockles, and find a ready market for all, the five-fingers and mussels being bought up by farmers for manure.

What is an Oyster?

The oyster is a mollusc or bivalve shell-fish, belonging to the genus ostrea, sub-class monomya, as it has only one adductor muscle for closing the two halves of the valve or double shell. It is a soft, cold-blooded, invertebrate animal, without any internal skeleton. The shells are composed of carbonate of lime with a small admixture of animal matter. Unlike many molluscs, it has no foot or locomotive organ, though occasional motion may be attained by rapid expulsions of water. At least a hundred different species are known to the naturalist in all parts of the world, at varying depths and going back to such an early period of geology as the palaeozoic, remains of the oyster are found in great variety, all of which are believed to have descended by evolution from one common ancestor, which lived in so remote an age that the mind can scarcely realise it. I have lately seen a large number of fossilized oysters found during the recent excavation for the new Staines reservoirs. At the same place were discovered several specimens of the Nautilus, still retaining the beautiful external pearly surface.

For the marvellous structure of the oyster there is no space in these notes, though passing reference must be made to one of its organs, the gills, which fulfil many more offices than those of the fish for instance. In the oyster they are a breathing organ. They purify its blood and keep up a circulation of water. They gather up food from the water and carry it to the mouth. They are also repro­ductive organs, and brood chambers, and carry out all these duties in the most wonderful way. Thanks to the painstaking investigations of Dr. Brooks and Lieutenant Winslow in America, to M. Bouchon-Brandeley in France, and to other scientists at home and abroad, we can under­stand things about the oyster which seem to have been a mystery to investigators of the origin of species. They have made it clear that the American oyster, ostrea virginica or virginiana, and the Portuguese oyster, ostrea angulata, are represented by the two sexes separately, but that the common oyster, ostrea edulis, which is the one cultivated in the British Isles, is hermaphrodite, and produces from a single oyster both female eggs and male cells, though probably at different periods.

In the common oyster that we know best, ostrea edulis, the eggs fall into the water-tube of the gills and lodge there, and the currents of water convey to them some of the male cells, which on contact fuse together, the male cell losing its identity in the egg, which is thus fertilized and at once begins to develop into a new oyster, becoming what is called spawn or spat.

With the American and Portuguese kinds, the eggs are cast forth in the waters, and, unless by accident they meet the fertilizing male cells speedily, both perish. though the embryos of these oysters are more numerous by far than those produced by our own bivalve, their chance of being fertilized is far less. It was, by the way, for the Portuguese oyster that Mr. Frank Buckland claimed the double advan­tage, that after eating the oyster, you could use the shell for a shoehorn.