NO. 1425. THOMAS MARTYN— BALL. 425 



A year later if we accept Maton and Dillwyn's authorit}^, the .sec- 

 ond eight}' plates was ready. Then, in an endeavor to push the work, 

 stimulate sales and avoid losses, a new preface was written, with a 

 plate showing- the medals, and testimonials from Baron Born, the cele- 

 brated custodian of the Imperial Museum at Vienna, a new title-page 

 was engraved, the ^hole sent out together, or the preface and medal 

 plate as a circular together; and last of all, in 1792 the subsequent 

 medals were engraved for the second plate, in what seems to have 

 been a vain attempt to make the sales pay the expenses. Marty n's 

 "Psyche," of which the U, S. National Museum possesses the iirst two 

 numbers, issued in 1797, though the plates are good, is in a much less 

 ambitious and artistic style of coloring, but even that seems to have 

 died of inanition. 



I think there is no reason to suppose that any part of the shell 

 plates of the Universal Conchologist were delayed until 1792, the date 

 of the second medal plate, which was probably added to sets in stock 

 as an advertisement. 



Maton and Rackett, writing in the lifetime of the author, and Dill- 

 wyn, only a few j^ears later than Martyn's last publication, both state 

 that there were two volumes, one issued in 1781 and the other in 1786, 

 in all containing 16(» (really 161) plates. The latter date may have 

 been taken from an advance copy, but in default of other evidence 

 must be allowed to stand. 



A point to which I wish to urge attention is that Martyn and his 

 bibliographers have not alwaj^s used the word ''volume" in the same 

 sense — the work being, as it appears, issued in two batches of eighty 

 plates each, for the most part, and these batches binding conveniently 

 into two volumes. Where Martyn, as in his prospectus, counted forty 

 plates as a volume and the whole as four, his bibliographers have been 

 prone to regard the work, in accordance with the binding, as com- 

 posed of two volumes only. 



I am not aware of any other copies of the Universal Conchologist 

 in America than the one I have described and a similar copy in the 

 library of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, but possibly 

 some of those naturalists in Europe who have access to the libraries 

 of Rome, Vienna, Paris, Madrid, or London may be able to furnish 

 at first hand some additions or corrections to the account I have given 

 above. 



Martj^n, like most of the early writers, was ambitious to propose 

 a system of his own, which he intended to give in full, with diagnoses, 

 at the close of the Avork. Owing to the cessation of publication with 

 the 160th plate, this scheme was never developed. In the two explana- 

 tory tables to the tirst eighty plates the place in Mart3'n's sj^stem to 

 which each genus belonged is indicated by a lower-case letter following 

 the trivial name in the first column of the table. In the second eighty 



