LINNEAN SOCIETY OF LONDON. xlvii 



most complete resume. But perhaps the greatest service that he 

 rendered to natural science was in the revival of the German 

 Academy Naturae Curiosorum, after a repose of twenty-seven years, 

 and the skill and industry which, for a period of forty years, 

 he bestowed upon the superintendence of the highly important 

 series of its ' Transactions ' from the ninth to the twenty-fourth 

 volumes. He became a Foreign Member of the Linnean Society 

 in 1827, and communicated to us, in addition to the paper pre- 

 viously mentioned, " A Descriptive Catalogue of the Graminece 

 and Cyperacew contained in the Indian Herbarium of Dr. Eoyle," 

 the characters of the new genera contained in which are given in 

 the first volume of our ' Proceedings.' He died at Breslau at the 

 commencement of the present year, in the 82nd year of his age. 



Conrad Jacob Temminck, Member of the Boyal Academy of 

 Sciences of the Netherlands, and one of the most distinguished 

 ornithologists of the present century, was born at Amsterdam, of 

 a good family, on the 31st of March 1778. His father, Jacob 

 Temminck, was Treasurer of the East India Company ; and he 

 was himself destined for a mercantile career, his friends obtaining 

 for him, at the age of 17, an appointment as one of the Vendu- 

 masters to the Company. In this capacity he had many oppor- 

 tunities of making himself acquainted with the numerous objects 

 of natural history brought home by the Company's ships. He 

 had also the advantage of studying a small collection of birds 

 made by his father, whose taste for natural history led him to 

 give such recommendations and other assistance to Levaillant in 

 his voyage to the Cape of Grood Hope, as induced the latter to 

 dedicate to him the first volume of his ' Oiseaux d'Afrique.' 

 Many of the specimens of birds brought home by Levaillant, and 

 still extant in the Museum at Leyden, were prepared by the 

 younger Temminck, who acquired great skill in the preservation of 

 the remains of animals, and especially of fishes, his mode of pre- 

 paring which became afterwards celebrated under the name of 

 Temminck' s method. His intimacy with Levaillant contributed 

 in no small degree to increase his taste for natural history, and is 

 supposed to have given him that facility in the use of the French 

 language, both in speaking and writing, which was so useful to 

 him in after-life ; but his chief instructor in natural science was 

 Bernhard Meyer, the collaborateur of "Wolf in the well-known 

 * Taschenbuch der Deutschen Ornithologie,' with whom he was 

 united by ties of the closest friendship. For some time he busily 

 occupied himself in the formation of a fine collection of birds and 



