1 8 PEOCEBDINGS OF THE 



in his State drives away more and more of the native species so 

 that he is obliged to go farther afield in search of them. After 

 1816 he commenced to take up the study of Arachnida. Collec- 

 tions of his drawings are highly priced and rare : one, of considerable 

 extent, is in the British Museum ; another set is mentioned by 

 Abbot as having been acquired of him by an Entomologist of 

 Zurich. Swainson bought a set of 104 drawings, of the fate of 

 which I am ignorant : probably they were included in his collection 

 of drawings which perished with the vessel, in which they were 

 conveyed to New Zealand. No one could appreciate their value 

 better than Swainson, and their exquisite beauty and accuracy must 

 have exercised a very beneficial iuflueace on the work of his own 

 pencil and brush. 



Swainson's expedition to Brazil, of which he himself has given 

 a short account *, occupied him not quite two years, during which 

 he collected in the proAince of Pernambuco, on the Rio San 

 Francisco, in the Bay of S. Salvador, and in the neighbourhood of 

 Eio de Janeiro. Among the men with whom he was brought in 

 contact by this journey, and from whom letters are extant, are the 

 celebrated Austrian traveller John Natterer, Prince Max of 

 Neuwied, and G. von Langsdorff, the Eussian Consul-General at 

 Eio, from whom he received very considerable additions to his own 

 collections of Plants and Insects. 



The following four years (1820-3) are signalized as a distinct 

 period in Swainson's life by several important events ; but I have 

 here to refer to those only on which the letters before us throw 

 some light. He commenced now the examination and arrange- 

 ment of his zoological collections, which yielded to him part of the 

 materials described and figured in ' Exotic Conchology ' and in 

 his ' Zoological Illustrations.' The latter is, perhaps, the most 

 meritorious of Swainson's works, and by the excellent figures, which 

 he prepared himself, he secured to it a very favourable reception. 

 Among his admirers he had not a more sincere friend than William 

 John Broderip, who had then already laid the foundation of his 

 famous collection of shells, to which Swainson had free and un- 

 limited access. Broderip took the warmest interest in the success 

 of Swainson's works ; he showed himself anxious that no part 

 should lay itself open to adverse criticism, and not without 

 very good grounds. Swainson was extremely careless in ortho- 

 graphy and loose in his style of writing ; he persistently misspelt 

 not ordy technical terms, but also the names of foreign authors, 

 and even of some of his familiar friends and correspondents ; he 

 knew no modern language but his own, and the application of 

 Latin and Greek for the purposes of systematic nomenclature was 

 a constant source of error. Broderip, who was a classical scholar 

 and an accomphshed and careful writer, desired to shield his friend 

 from the injury which he was inflicting upon his works by these 

 imperfections, and took infinite pains in revising and correcting 

 the proof-sheets. But so little was this friendly service appreciated 



* Edinb. Philos. Journ. i. 1819, pp. 369-373. 



