LAYARD: REMINISCENCES OF LATE HUGH CUMING. ae 
porting these cabinets, and their contents, from place to place, 
as I had no fixed home. 
I have often been asked why I have so seldom described 
the new species I have discovered in the various branches of 
Zoology to which I have, from time to time, devoted myself. 
This was entirely owing to the advice he gaveme. He pointed 
out, that without access to large museums and extensive 
libraries, in which to compare and work out my specimens, I 
must inevitably create numberless synonyms, and thus only 
make ‘confusion worse confounded.” He urged. me to 
continue my work as a field naturalist, and I have never 
regretted the choice I then made. 
I was once witness to a most amusing scene with him. 
On being admitted into the house, and told that Mr. Cuming 
was in his ‘‘ den,” I ran upstairs and found my old friend in a 
towering passion. He was walking excitedly up and down the 
room, declaiming to his secretary, “‘ The idiots ! the fools !’—he 
exclaimed as I entered the room—‘‘ see what they have done 
to those lovely shells! Ruined as beautiful a series as ever I 
put together! I got them together for the King of Zito 
present to the National Museum, and the curator has oiled 
them, and as you know the colour in most of the Cochlostyli is 
in the epidermis, which changes to a dull brown when wetted, 
or oiled, and they have sent back the shells, saying I have 
palmed off painted specimens! I don’t care for that, for 
they are foolsand don’t know a good shell from a bad one! 
{?? 
But to see those beauties ruined! ‘That provokes me 
I said I hoped they were not quite spoiled, and that if 
they had only been oiled, immersion in an alkali would prob- 
ably restore them. He gradually calmed down and became his 
own courteous, old-mannered, self again, and presently stepping 
to a cabinet he produced a fine example of AZegaspira Rustem- 
bergiana, which he handed to me, saying—“ That’s a shell I 
*I do not mention names, lest some of the actors should be living. 
