1867.] DR. J. E. GRAY ON THE CALYPTR/EID.-E. 729 



shown by the offer that was made to me respecting the new Volute ; 

 and private collections have been much enriched by such labours. 



No one knew better than Mr. Cuming the value of a new name 

 to his specimens, as shown by his enmity to any one who doubted 

 the novelty of the species described. He would not allow me to see 

 his collection for many years after his return from South America, 

 because I had pointed out to him at one of the meetings of this 

 Society that some of the shells which Messrs. Sowerby and Broderip 

 had described as new were well-known species, and well figured by 

 Chemnitz. Indeed I was not allowed to see any part of his col- 

 lection until it was first offered to the British Museum for sale, 

 during his illness about sixteen years ago. 



Since that period Mr. Cuming refused a well-known conchologist, 

 who had previously described several shells from his cabinet, any 

 further use of his collection, because he refused to admit that cer- 

 tain specimens which he 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 specimens 

 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 distant 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 sup- 

 posed 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 inducement 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 circum- 

 stances, 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 col- 

 lectors 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 



Proc. Zool. Soc— 1807, No. XLVII. 



