Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 44.djvu/21

 banks about the 1st of July; the little spat at once cling to it, if they are anywhere near, and they are allowed to remain on



the tile until October, when they have attained "about the size of a finger nail." The tiles are then carefully placed upon lighters and floated ashore, where the seedling oysters are detached from them "by short pushes of a chisel-like knife." The spat usually



averages on moderately clean ground about four hundred per tile, but as many as two thousand have been counted on one tile of fourteen inches by six.