MUSEUM GODEFFROY. 701 



tebrates in the regions which the Godeffroy collectors have visited ; 

 and what gives it peculiar value is its reliable indication of the 

 locality of the specimen, coming as it does from a trained collector 

 sending direct to the establishment. The fifth catalogue, issued in 

 1874, is a pamphlet of 252 pages, and notes, in close print, the 

 name, author, locality, and price, in Prussian currency, of about 

 9,600 species of insects, crustaceans, mollusks, echinoderms, coelen- 

 terates, and protozoans, besides several hundred vertebrates. Much 

 of this invertebrate material is in alcohol. The skillful use of this, by 

 both collector and curator, has allowed the preservation of a large 

 series of forms which are seldom offered for sale at a natural history 

 establishment. Such are beautiful coral-polyps and other zoophytes, 

 physalias, velellas, pyrosomes, salpidse, ascidians, holothurians, arach- 

 nidse, minute crustaceans, polyzooans, tunicates, and many other 

 forms of extremest interest to the student, but heretofore rarely obtain- 

 able. In a word, the Museum Godeffroy, as now conducted, is a vast 

 storehouse of material available for the cabinets and laboratories of 

 working naturalists and teachers of comparative zoology in all parts 

 of the world. It affords a splendid opportunity to our college profess- 

 ors to obtain those forms so needed in a systematic course of zoologi- 

 cal lectures or in rounding out the ordinal divisions in their museums. 



It may be wondered that so little has been known of this Hamburg 

 " Zoological Comptoir " in America. The reason is to be found in 

 the extreme (we had almost said unfortunate) delicacy of Herr Godef- 

 froy, who has never been willing in any way to publish this as a com- 

 mercial establishment ; even the catalogue gives only on one page, 

 accidentally as it were, the facts that the objects are for sale. 



The enterprise is carried on purely in the interests of scientific dis- 

 covery at a yearly expense, beyond returns, of several tTicusand dol- 

 lars. The staff of collectors, equipped and kept in the field, is very 

 large. Among those specially engaged at present are the following : 



Herr Hildebrand is dredging in the southern part of the Ked Sea 

 and along the east coast of Africa, and interior in the Somali land, a 

 region whose fauna is little known. Herr Darnel is at work in Eastern 

 Australia, having passed through Queensland and penetrated three 

 hundred miles into the interior, obtaining strange forms of mollusks 

 and that strangest of fishes the Geratodiis Fosteri. Six of these fishes, 

 about two feet long, have been secured by him, and six German muse- 

 ums have got these ichthyological treasures at two hundred Prussian 

 thalers each. Also in Australia. Frau Dietrich, a second Madame 

 Pfeiffer, for the last ten years has been traveling and collecting for 

 the Godeffroy Museum. Her collections of insects are astonishing in 

 the number of new forms brought to light. In the rapturous South- 

 Sea Islands Samoa, Viti, Pelew, Society, Marshall, and others Herr 

 Kubarz and Dr. Garret have resided for more than ten years, cruising 

 from island to island and making magnificent collections of polyps, 



