a 
Preface 
It was the twentieth year of Meiji (1857) when Mr. Hirase, president of our museum, moved with his family to Kyoto 
from his native province, Awaji, the largest island floating on the calm waters of the picturesque Inland Sea. Shortly after 
that he became a member of the Society of Natural History of Kyoto. In the course of time he was appointed manager 
of the society, and devoted himself to the duties of the position for many years. It was then that he became intimate with 
Mr. Marshall R. Gaines of America, Professor of Natural History at the Doshisha College, and acquired his first knowledge 
and interest in the study of conchology. It was about the same time also that he became well acquainted with Rev. John 
T. Gulick, an American student of land shells from the Hawaiian Is., who stimulated and deepened the president’s enthusiasm 
for collecting shells. 
It is now nearly thirty years since he first decided to take conchology as his special life study, and he has been engaged 
in collecting specimens ever since. His explorations have extended from Saghalien and the Kurile Is. in the north to Formosa 
and the Bonin Is. in the south. Filthy dust-heaps and ditches, brooks and rivers, swamps and lakes, dark valleys and deep 
forests, rocky hills and high mountains, fathomless seas and wide oceans, far away groups of isles and places unpleasing and 
difficult of access have not escaped his keen eye. 
The species he has thus collected number as many as 3,500, of which not less than 1.000 have been added for the 
first time to the list of shells of the world. The species that have been named in honor of the discoverer, such as Aivasea, 
ffivasiella, etc. are sixty-four. 
During these years he has corresponded with all noted conchologists of the world, joined the Conchological Society of 
Great Britain and Ireland, the Malacological Society of London and the Agassiz Association of America; and in 1910 was 
recommended as a corresponding member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He has freely offered his 
duplicates of Japanese species in exchange for foreign specimens; and this offer of his has been so accepted in every 
direction that he has collected a number of foreign species almost doubling his collection of Japanese shells. 
It occurred to him that it was like burying treasures under ground merely to pile up in store this valuable collection, 
beauties of nature, numbering over 10,000. It was also his great regret that whereas the visitor to large towns and cities in 
the West would meet with various kinds of museums where were shown their own fauna and natural products, and find that 
these were doing much toward social education, side by side with other educational institutions established for the purpose, 
we in Japan had only a few museum, and these exhibited ancient fine arts only; and that even the Tokyo Imperial Museum 
had only a small lot of natural history specimens exhibited in a corner, 
