September 28, 1841. 
William Yarrell, Esq., Vice-President, in the Chair. 
A letter from the Society’s Corresponding Member, J. B. Harvey, 
Esq., dated South Australia, March 25, 1841, wasread. This letter 
refers to some specimens which Mr. Harvey had forwarded on a 
former occasion as a present to the Society, and moreover states that 
he had, at the time of writing the letter, shipped another collection, 
part of which is also intended for the Society. 
A letter from W. V. Guise, Esq., was next read. In this letter, 
which is dated Sept. 25, 1841, Mr. Guise calls the attention of the 
Members to the fact that a young Hoopoe (Upupa Epops, Auct.) was 
killed on the eighth of September, at Frampton-on-Severn, by the 
gamekeeper of Henry Clifford, Esq. of Frampton Court. 
Mr. Lovell Reeve then submitted to the Meeting a Tabula Methodica 
of the plan he intended to adopt in his forthcoming ConcnoLoera 
Sysrematica, for the arrangement of the Lepades and Conchiferous 
Mollusca. He stated, that in reviewing the history of Conchology, 
which may be dated from the time of Adanson and Linnzus, it was 
evident that few of these remarkable animals were then known; and 
although the classification proposed by the latter has been aban- 
doned, from the fact of its having been based almost entirely upon 
the outward characters of the shells alone, without reference to the 
anatomy or habits of their animal inhabitants; it may be remem- 
bered as a most laudable attempt on the part of that great father 
of natural history, to introduce into his theory of nature a scientific 
arrangement of certain shells then before him, which he knew to be 
the production of certain once living animals. This fallacious me- 
thod, therefore, was his alternative; he must have been well aware 
that he could no more arrive at the true history of the Mollusca by 
their shells alone, than at the natural history of Birds by their feathers 
alone ; but, in the absence of the soft and living parts, he succeeded 
in establishing an arrangement, by noting such marks and symbols 
on the shell as could be supposed by analogy to indicate corre- 
sponding characters and developments in the organization of its 
animal. Since the time of Linneus our intercourse with foreign 
lands and the general progress of civilization have given increased 
facilities of obtaining the animals in their native condition; thus, 
their anatomy and habits have become the popular subject of mves- 
tigation, raising the study of Conchology to a level with the rest of 
the natural sciences. From the commencement of the present cen- 
tury various naturalists have assisted in reorganizing the arrange- 
ment and division of the Lepades and Mollusca ; Bruguiére, Lamarck, 
Cuvier, De Blainville, Deshayes and Gray have successively devoted 
