44 Transactions of the Society. 



already published or in print. The date of the South Ameiican 

 Memoir, as we shall see (p. 47), is settled by Troschel's epitome, 

 and as he quotes in it both the Cuba and the Canary Island 

 Memoirs by page ^ it evidently came third. In the Paris Basin 

 Memoir he quotes all three.- This, therefore, is the order of 

 precedence which they take in synonymies. 



The Cuba Memoir is of course the most important, for it 

 contains the whole of his knowledge as it stood at that date, and 

 drives diacnoses of every genus of Foraminifera which he had 



O O t/ O •11' 



hitherto observed in any material in his possession, whetlier it 

 occurred in the Cuba material or not. A glance at the Tables in 

 Appendix F. makes this plain. By this time, for instance, he 

 was in touch with von Hauer, and he diagnosed genera from 

 von Hauer's material which were not fully dealt with till the 

 appearance of the Vienna Memoir in 1846. I have referred {ante, 

 passim) to his general Introduction and the statement of his views 

 and position included therein. Eamon de la Sagra had entrusted 

 d'Orbigny with the arrangement of the zoological portion of his 

 History of Cuba, and among the material was a small quantity of 

 sand, the richness of whose Foraminiferal fauna struck d'Orbigny 

 at once. He communicated with de Cande, a naval officer^ stationed 

 in the West Indies, who supplemented de la Sagra's material with 

 sands from Cuba, Haiti, St. Thomas, Jamaica, Martinique, and 

 Guadeloupe, and a year's assiduous work on the material proved to 

 d'Orbigny that Cuba provides all the species to be found in any 

 West Indian gatherings, besides many species not found elsewhere 

 in the West Indies. He pronounces the dictum that Cuba cannot 

 be compared for Foraminiferal fauna with any place in the world 

 excepting the Adriatic* He found in the Cuban sands 117 species, 

 " one-tenth of the whole of the Foraminifera known up to the 

 present day," and on these results being communicated to de la 

 Sagra they agreed that the work " should serve as a basis for the 

 study of the Foraminifera, comprehending my general views, my 

 classification, and the succinct characters of all the genera," and 

 he therefore gives an abstract of the general observations which 

 he proposes to publish later in his " ouvrage special." He points 

 out that until that moment nothing at all was known of the 

 Foraminifera of the Antilles except about twenty species that he 

 had noted in the "Tableau Methodique." ^ At the end of his 

 Introduction he makes the astonishing statement that so specialized 

 are the Cuban forms that of the whole 117 he had only found 

 five in other parts of the world, but this must be read in the light 



1 IX., pp. 22, 24, 26. 2 X., p. 4, note (1). 



3 See Appendix E. ■* VII., p. xii. 



•^ I make it fourteen species. See p. 29. 



