It is a very pretty sight to see a healthy Pecten in a vessel of
clear sea-water. The elegant valves are opened to a considerable
width, perhaps to half an inch or more, and the entire aperture all
round is filled by a curtain, which drops from one to the other,
perpendicularly, a little way within the margin. This is the
mantle, and it is generally painted with rich colours, in irregular
patterns, often of spots and marbled clouds of black on a rich green
ground, or pearly-green clouds on flesh-colour--sometimes pale-yellow
clouds on velvet-black; but these hues have no perceptible relation
with those of the shell. Looking closely, you see that the mantle is
not single, but composed of two curtains, whose edges meet in the
middle. And now these are slightly separating, and giving us a peep
into the interior; but the most notable thing we see is the array of
long white taper tentacles which proceed from each edge, and wave to
and fro in the clear water; while another row of similar organs, but
larger, is affixed to each curtain along the line where it starts from
the shell. And along this same line, scattered between the bases of
the larger tentacles, there is a row (and a corresponding one on the
other curtain) of beads, which seem to be turned out of the richest
and most lustrous gems. Even the unassisted eye is arrested by the
flashing brilliance, but with a powerful lens they look like rubies
set in sockets of sapphire, from which the light blazes forth with
incomparable brilliance. These are the Pecten’s eyes, each of which
possesses all the parts requisite for perfect vision.
The valves vary much in colour. Some are pure white; some white with
a crimson line along the summit of each radiating ridge; some rosy,
crimson, or lilac; some cream, straw-yellow, deep yellow; some dull
brick-red, dark purplish-red, or sienna-brown; some are marbled with
black on a red ground, making a very rich pattern.
The largest specimens, and those with greatest variety in hue, are
found in deep water, and for the most part congregated in large
numbers on some particular spot of the sea-bottom, which is called a
scallop-bed. Such are found in Weymouth Bay, and in Torbay; and there
the shell-fish can be obtained in sufficient quantity for the market.
At Weymouth there is a considerable business done in these delicacies,
which is, however, almost all in the hands of one dealer, from whom I
have collected some details of interest.
The ordinary trawlers avoid the scallop-beds, if possible, because
they are liable to have their nets torn by them; the sharp valves
doubtless catching and cutting the meshes. But they often bring up many
unintentionally, and a naturalist would find a trawler’s refuse a most
productive field: for numbers of rare and valuable zoophytes and other
forms of life come up attached to the shells, which might easily be
saved, but are not: the men “have no time, for they are so anxious to
get their craft into a berth, and then to take out the fish as soon as
the trawl is up.”
Twenty bushels of scallops are sometimes taken at once; but this is
rare. The average produce of the Weymouth trawlers is five bushels
per week, which are readily sold at twopence per hundred; about seven
hundred going to the bushel. The customers are “mostly the genteels,”
who eat the _morceaux_ stewed with flour or scolloped. The worthy woman
who commands the supply had had the trade in her hands for twenty-eight
years (in 1853); she had never heard them called by any other name
than “Squins,” though she understood they were called Scallops in some
places. “Squin” is by some said to be a corruption of “Quin,” after the
actor and epicure of that name, who is reported to have been fond of
the delicate mollusk; but I much doubt the derivation.[12]
As a proof of the tenacity of life possessed by this species, a
fisherman assured me that he once put a quantity in a bag into a
cupboard and forgot them, till, after the lapse of a week, turning them
out he found them alive.