Nomenclature of the Foraminifera. 335 



accordance with the binomial plan of Linnaeus. These names 

 were chiefly modifications of prominent terms selected from 

 Walker's, or rather Jacob's, brief descriptions : for example, the 

 Nautilus subarcuatus geniculis exertis of the latter became the 

 Nautilus suharcuatulus of Adams. These facts would lead us to 

 ascribe the names usually given to the more common British 

 Foraminifera to Adams rather than to the authors of the ' Tes- 

 tacea Minuta Rariora -' but my kind friend Dr. Gray has called 

 my attention to a note on p. 344 of Dillwyn's * Catalogue of 

 Recent Shells/ where, under the head of Nautilus lobatulus, the 

 author observes, ' It first appeared with the present name in 

 the " Essays on the Microscope •/' and Adams there says he had 

 obtained a manuscript corrected copy of the minute shells, to 

 which Walker had added all the trivial names [which he has 

 used] .' ' This,' as Dr. Gray observes to me in a recent com- 

 munication, 'sets the matter at rest why they are quoted as 

 Walker's.' " . 



It is in the second, or Kanmacher^s, edition of Adams's ' Es- 

 says on the Microscope*' that the binomial appellations are 

 given to Walker's figures, or rather to some of them, which are 

 faithfully copied in Kanmacher's 14th plate. In a note at 

 page 633, Kanmacher says, "Being possessed of Mr. Jacob's 

 own corrected copy of the work (Test. Min.), to which he has 

 annexed the trivial names, I am thereby enabled to affix them 

 to the several shells here enumerated." Kanmacher's observa- 

 tions (including an extract from a letter written by Sir J. Banks 

 to Mr. Jacob) on the joint work of Walker, Boys, and Jacob, 

 and on the study of minute shells, are well worth reading 

 (p. 630, &c.). 



The specimens examined and figured by Walker were obtained 

 by Mr. Boys and himself from the shore-sands of Sandwich, 

 Faversham, Sheppey, and the intervening coast ; and amongst 

 them we have some fossil Foraminiferaf washed by the action 

 of the sea and streams from the tertiary clays and sands of the 

 respective neighbourhoods, and mixed with the recent shells in 

 the mud and sands of the coast J. 



* Essays on the Microscope, by the late George Adams. The second 

 edition, with considerable additions and improvements, by Frederick Kan- 

 macher, F.L.S., 4to, London, 1798. 



t Still more fossil specimens from these localities were afterwards 

 figured and described by Col. Montagu, who worked over Mr. Boys's col- 

 lection, which appears to have been increased by materials accumulated 

 during several years subsequent to the time when Walker and Jacob had 

 it in hand. 



X This was remarked by one of us some years since (Quart. Journ.Geol. 

 Soc. vol. viii. p. 267). Foraminifera from the Chalk also are in many 

 places abundantly mixed with the sea-sand of the Kentish coast; and 



