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Wonders of Science
Pearls in the Human Body
PEARLS, as every one knows, are made when on oyster covers up
with "mother-of-pearl" a grain of sand of other irritant which
has found its way into its shell, in the same way a pearl can
be deliberately produced by placing a foreign body in the shell of a
uving oyster and leaving it for a time. But there is another way in
which man can make real pearls—without the aid of an oyster He
«an (If only by accident and "once In a blue moon") make pearls
within his own body!
There is at least one case on record of this having been done. A
man suffering from kidney trouble underwent1 an operation, and in
his kidneys the surgeon found a number of pearls They were per
fectly genuine pearls, "real" as any that ever came out of an oyster.
But they did not make the unfortunate patient much richer, for they
were only one-tenth of an inch in diameter.
The interesting thing about these "home-made" pearls was that
they had been made in exactly the same way as an oyster produced
pearls. To protect itself from some irritant grains the man's kidney
had covered them with "mother-of-pearl."
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