Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 82.djvu/545

Rh the awabi, is a smaller species and the holes of the shell are relatively large, so that only the central part is of value, chiefly for use in inlaying. Gathering abalones is especially carried on by women divers, who swim out to the fishing grounds and work in depths of from six to eight fathoms. Pearls are not often found, but the meat is dried and sold as dark red disks strung on sticks.

The familiar polished abalone shells have gone all over the world and everywhere are highly esteemed as ornaments. The shell is polished by grinding it first on a carborundum wheel until the desired colors are reached. The shell is then surfaced by a wheel of felt sprinkled with carborundum dust glued to the wheel. Finally it is

polished with a wheel made of many layers of cotton on the edges of which tripoli has been rubbed. This wheel is revolved about twenty-two hundred times per minute. The quality of being easy, or hard, to grind and polish is spoken of by the manufacturers as the texture of the shell.

The shells are Sorted into two classes, but ordinarily classes one and two are mixed together. At Avalon, in 1870, when the meat sold for five cents a pound, the green shells brought eighty dollars a ton. At the present time the green shells are sold at one hundred and twenty-five to one hundred and eighty dollars a ton, the black, at eighty to one hundred dollars a ton, and the red, at forty to seventy-five dollars a ton. The black shells, with especially good pearly centers, bring from three hundred to five hundred dollars a ton. Owing to the increasing scarcity