After setting aside the fifth for the royal officials, the Spaniards divided amongst themselves the pearls they had secured.  They say they are extremely valuable.  Here is a proof of the great value of the pearls from that island.  Many of them are white and have a beautiful orient, and are as large or even larger than a nut.  What has quickened my recollection is the remembrance of a pearl which the Sovereign Pontiff, Paul, predecessor of Your Holiness, bought from a Venetian merchant through the intermediary of my relative Bartolomeo the Milanese, for forty-four 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