PRESIDENTS ADDRESS.—SECTION D. 79 
Collections made by private individuals found their way into 
privately-owned museums. The ultimate fate of privately- 
owned collections is apt to be precarious; and this was extra- 
ordinarily so with a number of early collections which con- 
tained Australian types or other material. Private collectors 
or private owners of collections were free to deal with their 
specimens as they chose; and the former often, if not usually, 
distributed the components of an originally single collection 
among several museums. They were under no obligation to 
publish the history of their specimens or collections, and in 
some important cases such was never published. It is also 
difficult to ascertain in what localities, under what circumstances, 
and at what time private collectors exercised their functions ; 
and to distinguish between actual collectors and those who 
merely obtained specimens from others, and took or sent these 
to England. Specimens purchased from dealers were apt to be 
supplied under some such circumstances as those mentioned by 
Dr. Gray in the preface to his “List of the Specimens of 
Mammalia in the Coll. of the Brit. Mus.” (1843), in which he 
says: “ The habitat is given as particularly as the materials pos- 
sessed by the Museum permit; but many of the specimens 
having been procured from dealers, some of whom are unfor- 
tunately very careless on this point, and even occasionally guilty 
of wilful mis-statement, it is often impossible to give the habitat, 
except in the most general terms.” 
Some of the zoologists who described Australian species in the 
Pre-Victorian Era are also responsible for much of the ob- 
scurity in which early faunistic history is involved. On the 
whole, for a considerable time British zoologists fought shy of 
attempting to work out Australian collections as collections. 
It was much easier to pick out and deal with specimens that 
were beautiful or curious, or which were thought to be the 
representatives of undescribed species, and leave all the rest. 
The only notable Pre-Victorian exceptions were Mr. Vigors and 
Dr. Horsfield, who studied the Australian birds in the Linnean 
Society’s collection (c); and Dr. J. E. Gray and Mr. W. S. 
Macleay, who described the collections obtained by Captain 
P. P. King on his coast surveys (d). The first of these im- 
portant publications, however, for some unexplained reason 
was not completed, the authors not proceeding farther than the 
Meliphagide. “The non-completion of their labours is the 
more to be regretted, inasmuch as the Linnean Society’s col- 
lection of birds, at that time the finest extant, comprised many 
species collected by Mr. Brown during his voyage with the cele- 
brated navigator, Flinders, and was moreover enriched with 
(c) Trans. Linn Soc., xv., Part I., 1826, pp. 170-331. 
(d@) Appendix to King’s ‘‘ Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western 
Coasts of Australia, performed between the years 1818 and 1822.’’ Vol. ii. (1827). 
