1,'3B Dr. Maton's and Mr. Rackett's 
LISTER. - 
There is no name in the annals of natural history that deserves 
to be mentioned with more respect than that of our countryman 
Dr. Martin Lister, to whom, in this historical catalogue, we have 
given the place appropriate to the time of the publication of his 
Synopsis, or general work on shells : but, as this was far from 
being the first in order of his publications, we shall beg leave to 
preface our account of it with some remarks on his earlier produc- 
tions. We may be permitted, perhaps, to be less concise on the 
subject of this celebrated writer than we have shown ourselves 
with respect to most of his predecessors, when it is considered that 
he was the father of British Testaceology, and that in the labour, 
accuracy, and extent of his works, as well as in the philosophical 
spirit with which they were executed, he has far surpassed all 
the writers of that period. His figures, both in point of number 
and faithfulness, are with reason still held in such high estimation, 
that no person attached to this branch of natural history can ad- 
vance in it without the constant use of them, nor without finding 
them preferable for reference to many more splendid engravings 
which have succeeded them. 
The earliest essays of Lister on the subject of the Testacea ap- 
peared in the Philosophical Transactions, that general and useful 
receptacle for accidental and detached discoveries in natural sci- 
ence, for the preservation of which the Royal Society was insti- 
tuted, and to which our indefatigable countryman was one of the 
earliest and most valuable contributors. His first communication 
was (anonymously) on the subject of heterostrophous shells. At 
this time he was living at York, whence some subsequent com- 
munications were dated, and where he made many of those ob- 
servations relative to zoology and fossils which formed an impor- 
tant 
