498 COLLECTIONS OF SHELLS AND MINERALS. 



his intellect, ambitiously strives after an earthly immor 

 tality, which, even in the most successful cases, a thousand 

 years melt away into the dimness of traditionary fable ! 



Among the working naturalists attached to Amherst 

 College, Professor Adams, a physiological conchologist 

 of much minute and laborious research, is one of the 

 most zealous. The shells of Jamaica have received much 

 of his attention, and he has paid several visits to that 

 island, for the purpose of enriching the cabinet of his 

 college. In microscopic shells, he states the coast of 

 Jamaica to be amazingly rich. In his monograph of a 

 new microscopic species allied to Turbo and Margarita, to 

 which he has given the name of Vitrinella, he states that 

 most of his specimens were obtained from a single pint 

 of sand taken from a sand-beach in a little cove near Port 

 Royal, Jamaica, which pint of sand contained 110 species 

 of shells ! In such microscopic shells of new and unde- 

 scribed species and genera, his collections are very rich. 



The mineralogical collection of Professor Sheppard, 

 who resides at Amherst part of the year, are also dis 

 played in the museum of the college, and contains many 

 choice specimens. Of the mineral specimens which 

 attracted my attention most, as economically valuable, 

 were nodules of phosphate of lime from the meiocene 

 (tertiary) green sands of Martha s Vineyard an island 

 lying off the mainland of Massachusetts, to the south of 

 Plymouth. The occurrence of such nodules in this 

 geological position is very interesting, not only from 

 the possibility that further search may discover them 

 either there or elsewhere in the tertiary green sands 

 of the Atlantic coast, in sufficient quantity to make 

 them economically valuable, but because it seems to 

 indicate an original connection between green sand 

 and phosphate of lime, which is not altogether of an 

 accidental kind. If nodules of this phosphate abound 

 in the green sand formation below the chalk, and give 



