Dr. H. H. DalVs Letter. ii 



to pass about three months at Honolulu, at work upon the col- 

 lection, but, other engagements having left me only about two 

 months for my visit to the Islands, this time was cut short. How- 

 ever, in the sequel this has proved not to be disadvantageous be- 

 cause, during the time at my disposal, I have done all that I could 

 do here in the way of revision, and found that, to complete the 

 work, I should require the greater facilities for access to literature 

 and investigations not yet in print, which are afforded me in 

 Washington. I have copied that portion of the catalogue which 

 relates to the groups for which such reference is necessary, and 

 will take this catalogue with me and make the revision upon it 

 and, when completed, return it to you from Washington. By a 

 rough calculation from a\'eraging the entries on the pages of the 

 type-written catalogue I find the colledtion contains between 8000 

 and 9000 species and about 25,000 specimens. Of these about 

 one-fourth are pulmonate landshells. All are neatly mounted on 

 card tablets with printed labels and very f€w are without complete 

 identification and locality. 



As might be expected from Mr. Garrett's residence and con- 

 necftions the collection is particularly rich in Pacific Ocean material 

 and leaving out of consideration a few great national collecftions 

 like those of London, Berlin, Washington and Geneva the Garrett 

 is among the most complete if not adlually the best supplied with 

 the shells of the Pacific Islands. The series of landshells of the 

 Solomon and Hervey groups is the finest I have seen anywhere, 

 and those of the Society Islands are probably very complete. 



In the marine shells the Cones and Pleurotomoids are especially 

 rich and include many very rare forms. Scattered through the 

 colleelion here and there, I have found a number of extremely 

 rare forms which are common to only a very few fortunate 

 museums. Several of these had been identified erroneously by Mr. 

 Garrett or his correspondents, with more common species and the 

 revision just made has corre(5ted the error. A certain proportion 

 of the species were wrongly named, which is not surprising when 

 we consider that Garrett had no access to a large library or 

 museum, and was obliged in great part to rely on the identifica- 

 tions made by more or less competent collectors with whom he ex- 

 changed specimens. A very valuable portion of the collection 

 consists in the series of type specimens of the species described as 



