DAVID HUMPHREYS STORER. 389 



for collecting extended even to coins. At one time he was in league 

 with all the toll gatherers on the Boston bridges, and they kept for 

 him any odd pieces of money which fell into their hands. This pas- 

 sion for numismatics, it may be added, appears to have been handed 

 down to his desceudants, one son being still deeply interested in the 

 subject, and a grandson the Curator of the Coins belonging to Harvard 

 University. The coin-collecting mingled curiously with his Natural 

 History interests, and we are told that he persuaded the keepers of 

 several sailor's boarding-houses to secure for him any coins, shells, 

 or fishes which their guests might have obtained in foreign parts. 



It was natural that he should join the Boston Society of Natural His- 

 tory, which he did immediately after its foundation in 1830, so that he has 

 always been enrolled as one of the " original members," though he was 

 not strictly such ; his activity is attested to by his being chosen a few 

 months later Recording Secretary, a post he held for nearly six years. 

 At this time he appears to have been giving special attention to Mol- 

 lusca, and as a number of other gentlemen at the same period in our 

 city were also forming collections, it was doubtless from the enthu- 

 siasm born of this common interest that he ventured to issue the pros- 

 pectus of a contemplated translation of Kiener's " Iconographie," then 

 in course of publication in Paris ; but for lack of support only one part 

 of the translation ever appeared, an octavo of about a hundred and 

 fifty pages, issued in 1837. His own collection, kept until his death, 

 has recently been given to Bowdoin College. 



It is apparent, then, that in his early manhood he had made a some- 

 what thorough acquaintance with more than one department of natural 

 history, and this makes it natural that his name was mentioned (and, 

 if he had permitted, would have been urged) by his friends for the 

 post of Naturalist to the government exploring expedition under Cap- 

 tain Wilkes. It explains, too, his success in a field he had then hardly 

 cultivated ; for the turning point in his career as a naturalist came 

 when, in 1837, as the result of a memorial of the Natural History So- 

 ciety to the General Court, the legislature authorized a Natural His- 

 tory Survey of the Commonwealth, and the Governor appointed Dr. 

 Storer one of the Commissioners to prosecute it. The several commis- 

 sioners divided the work between them, and as Dr. A. A. Gould, an 

 older and more experienced malacologist, was naturally assigned the 

 Mollusca, Dr. Storer undertook the description of the fishes and rep- 

 tiles of the State. He had previously paid some attention to one of 

 these groups, the fishes, as is shown by the justly severe criticism of 

 Smith's list of our species which he published the year before in the 



