MELVILL: MEMOIR OF THE LATE HUGH CUMING. 65 
‘“‘T may briefly state that this collection, as now offered to 
the British Museum, contains upwards of 19,000 species and 
varieties of shells, represented by about 60,000 specimens ; and 
that not only is every specimen entire, but choice and perfect 
of its kind, as respects form, texture, colour, and other characters 
that give it value in the eyes of the shell-collector. 
“As I can affirm from my personal knowledge, and from 
authentic sources of information, that no public collection in 
Europe possesses one-half the number of species of shells that 
are now in the Cumingian collection, you may judge of the vast 
proportion of rarities and unique specimens possessed by Mr. 
Cuming. It is this which has given him for some years past the 
command, so to speak, of all the conchological cabinets in 
Europe. He is better known and respected, and his labours 
more truly and generally appreciated in any city or town in 
Europe having a public natural history museum than in busy 
London. Mr. Cuming in his annual visits to the continent 
carries with him the inferior duplicates of his rarities, represent- 
ing species with the sight of which the eyes of the foreign 
naturalist are gladdened for the first time. They open to him 
their treasures in return, and from most of the collections of 
Europe Mr. Cuming has borne away the prized species or speci- 
mens in exchange for the still rarer and more valuable shells 
which his abundance has enabled him to offer without detri- 
ment to his own stores. 
“The mode in which Mr. Cuming has obtained this con- 
chological wealth is as moral and exemplary as the result is 
important and marvellous, considered as the work of one indi- 
vidual. Not restricting his pursuit to the stores and shops of 
the curiosity-mongers of our seaports, or depending on casual 
opportunities of obtaining rarities by purchase, he has devoted 
more than thirty of the best years of his life to arduous and 
hazardous personal exertion, dredging, diving, working, wander- - 
ing under the Equator and through the Tropics, the Temperate 
Zones, both north and south, in the Atlantic, in the Pacific, in 
31/7/95. E 
