Miscellaneous. 319 



letter containing a cheque for <£50, which I returned to him, ob- 

 serving that there were duplicate specimens of certain birds in the 

 collection that we had not in the British Museum, and that I should 

 be pleased if he would let the Museum have them, which he most 

 readily acceded to. 



The collection was a very large and good one, but it has one 

 fault common to most French collections ; that is to say, the bird- 

 stuffers constantly pull off the feathers, and replace them, with gum, 

 so as to give the body a smooth appearance, and they are not 

 always careful to put the feathers into the parts from which they 

 were extracted. Until I saw the operation in the French laboratories 

 I could not understand why some figures of birds in French works, 

 and some descriptions of species taken from specimens in French 

 museums, are said, as in Wagler's ' Systema Avium,' not to be quite 

 true to nature. 



Genera of Gorgoniadae. By Professor Verkill. 



Professor Verrill, in a paper on the Corals and Polypes of the west 

 coast of America, in the first volume of the 'Transactions of the Con- 

 necticut Academy,' p. 385, proposes to divide the family Gorgoniadae 

 into genera according to the spicules, thus : — 



1. Gorgonia, with spindles in the ccenenchyma and an external 

 layer of peculiar small club-shaped spicules, producing a smooth sur- 

 face. Type G. verrucosa. Professor Verrill says this genus is very 

 nearly allied to Eunicea. 



2. Pterogorgia. The spicules in the ccenenchyma small, with double 

 spindles, and also crescent- or bracket-shaped; they are nearly smooth 

 on the convex side. Type P. dcerosa. 



3. Eugorgia, with longer and shorter double spindles and nu- 

 merous double wheels ; surface decidedly granulous with naked spi- 

 cules. Type E. ampla. 



4. Litigorgia, having only the two forms of double spindles; surface 

 somewhat granulous, but less so than in the last. Type L. Flora. 



He proposes to divide the genera into groups according to the 

 branching of the coral, which M. Valenciennes used as a generic 

 character. 



Lamarck's Collection of Shells. By Dr. J. E. Gray. 

 Lamarck, in his work on Invertebrated Animals, described some of 

 the species of shells from specimens in his own cabinet, and others from 

 examples in the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes. This naturalist, 

 who had a most wonderful faculty of perceiving natural groups and 

 their relation to each other, and certainly was one of the most in- 

 dustrious of the votaries of natural science (for he not only published 

 on zoology and botany, but on other branches of science), in his old 

 age became blind, and so reduced in circumstances that when I 

 saw him he was living in a very small room, with scarcely any fur- 

 niture, on the stair leading to the library of the museum, chiefly 

 supported by the labours of his daughters, who were employed to 



