OF CONCHOLOGY. 205 



net, any further use of his collection, because he refused to 

 admit that certain specimens which be sent to him to be described 

 were new to science, or different from species already described. 



The system that Mr. Cuming adopted, of selecting three spe- 

 cimens of each variety or species most alike, tended to prevent 

 the number of nominal or presumed species from being observed 

 during a casual examination of the collection, as it excluded 

 those specimens which showed the transition from one variety to 

 another which occurs in any given species — more especially as 

 the species were not arranged in the drawers so that the most 

 allied or presumed species were near to each other, but, on the 

 contrary, the two or more variations of the same species were 

 often placed as species in different parts of the series. 



The fact of a naturalist having the power of merely adding 

 his name after the name of an animal or plant described has 

 been supposed to have influenced many in attempting to establish 

 species, or in altering the names of old species on very slight 

 grounds ; but if we add to this little vanity the greater induce- 

 ment of an increase in the value of the specimens themselves 

 and the collection in which they are contained, or of increasing 

 the sale of the book in which they are described and figured, or 

 further, if a naturalist is to be paid so much per species for all 

 the species he can describe from a collection, it is not difficult to 

 believe, under these various circumstances, that the number of 

 the species in such a collection are very needlessly increased. 



This has caused so many nominal species to be created by 

 collectors of ferns and other plants and by nurserymen; but 

 such names are rarely regarded as of any authority by scientific 

 botanists. 



I have had the shells of the Cumingian collection placed on 

 tablets so that they may be arranged in the same series as the 

 other shells in the British Museum ; but each tablet is marked 

 in such a manner that it may be at once distinguished from the 

 rest of the collection, so that there can be no doubt about which 

 are the types or the presumed types of the species described 

 from the collection. I feared that, if the shells were not placed 

 on tablets, the specimens of the same species might be separated 

 from their allies and mixed with those of other species, and thus 

 the identity of the nomenclature might be destroyed or rendered 

 doubtful. 



It is to be hoped that some day this magnificent collection of 

 shells in the British Museum may be studied scientifically, and 

 all their nominal and dealers' species be reduced to synonyms, 

 and eventually allowed to drop out of the catalogue, to which 

 .the greater part of them ought never to have been admitted. To 



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