Gem Of The Ocean

摘要

Tust as household trash tells you a lot about a family, so mankind's rubbish heaps reveal much about the species. One of the best lies in the waters around Manhattan. There, archaeologists have found mounds of oyster shells, known as middens, dating back to 6950BC.rnPeople have fed on oysters so long that the man whom Jonathan Swift called brave for first eating one is quite out of range of history's eye. Sergius Orata, a Roman engineer who lived in the first century bc, cultivated oysters in southern Italian lakes by bringing them to spawn on rock piles that he surrounded with twigs. Larval oysters settled on the twigs, which the cultivator could monitor easily; when the oysters grew to marketable size, they were plucked off and sold.