14 AXEL A. OLSSON 



Later Jewett returned east, became interested in Paleozoic fossils of New 

 York State, of which he amassed an unsurpassed collection and in this way 

 he became associated with James Hall and finally awarded the post of 

 Curator of the State Museum at Albany. 



The name of C. B. Adams will always remain closely associated with 

 Panamic shells. Adams was a professor of zoology at Amherst College in 

 Massachusetts and in his earlier years had collected extensively in Jamaica, 

 B.W.I. , describing many species of both land and marine moUusks from 

 there. On a leave of absence from teaching, Adams went to Panama, landed 

 at Chagres on November 22, 1850 which at that time was the usual starting 

 point for crossing the isthmus. With two companions, he started upriver 

 by canoe and reached Las Cruces on the 25th. There they secured horses 

 and rode the remaining few miles into Panama City where he secured 

 lodging at the American Hotel. Adams stayed at Panama five weeks, col- 

 lected assiduously, and kept copious notes recording species abundance and 

 habitat station. Adams' account of his stay in Panama and of the collecting 

 conditions met with there then are of high scientific, as well as historical 

 value, and have often been quoted in part as an illustration of the exuber- 

 ance of life which is sometimes developed in tropical waters where abundant 

 food and suitable environment attain their optimum conditions. 



The material gathered by Adams was shipped to Amherst filling eight 

 large cases and when unpacked and sorted was found to contain 30,920 

 specimens of 515 species of mollusks of which 157 were afterward described 

 as new, a large part of these new species being small or minute forms over- 

 looked or ignored by the earlier collectors. Adams' Panama paper was pub- 

 lished in 1852 but unfortunately the new species were not figured so that 

 their identification until recently was difficult and uncertain. The Adams 

 Collection was on loan at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia 

 for some time where the author had an opportunity to examine it closely. 

 The collection has since been acquired by the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology at Harvard College, and a paper illustrating its type specimens 

 was published by Ruth Turner in 1955. 



A large collection of Mexican marine shells was made by Frederick 

 Reigen, a Belgian, while in residence at Mazatlan between 1848 and 1850. 

 This collection was sent to Liverpool and was eventually acquired by P. 

 P. Carpenter. The shells selected by Carpenter, augmented by a large 

 number of small or minute forms picked from the debris washed from" 

 Chama and Spondylus became the subject of a report published as a cata- 

 logue by the British Museum in 1875. More than 600 species of marine 

 mollusks are covered in this work, the descriptions composed in Latin and 

 accompanied in most cases by fairly copious notes. A large number of new 

 species were described, mostly minute forms, and being unaccompanied by 

 figures, the Mazatlan Catalogue has been difficult to use so that in many 

 respects it retarted rather than advanced our knowledge of Pacific Coast 

 shells for a long time. In full justice to Carpenter, no one was better qualified 

 to monograph the Pacific Coast mollusks. Carpenter was already fully 



