Miscellaneous^ 151 



the prized species or specimens in exchange for the still rarer and 

 more valuable shells, which his abundance has enabled him to offer, 

 without detriment to his own rich stores. The mode in which Mr. 

 Cuming has obtained this conchological wealth is as novel and 

 exemplary as the result is important and marvellous, considered as 

 the work of one individual. 



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 in arduous and hazardous personal exer- 

 tions, — dredging, diving, wading, wandering, — under the equator, 

 and through the temperate zones, both south and north, in the 

 Atlantic, in the Pacific, in the Indian Ocean and the islands of its 

 rich archipelago, in the labour of collecting from their native seas, 

 shores, lakes, rivers and forests the marine, fiiuviatile and terrestrial 

 mollusks, 60,000 of whose shelly skeletons, external and internal, 

 are accumulated in orderly series in the cabinets with which the 

 floors of his house now groan. I never think of the casualty to 

 which such a collection in such a place is subject without a shudder. 



The result of this personal capture of the chief bulk of his collec- 

 tion is, that he has been enabled to assign to each shell, not only 

 its country or * habitat ' in the ordinary zoological sense, but all the 

 circumstances in which it lived and was developed : if a land-shell, 

 e. g. its favourite rock, or herb, or tree ; if a water-shell, the kind 

 of water ; and if marine, the depth and the nature of the sea-bottom 

 at which the mollusk resided, the rock that it bored, and the animals, 

 the weeds or other substances it devoured. 



The importance of these particulars will be peculiarly appreciated 

 by the palaeontologist, on account of the insight they afford into 

 the habits and habitat of the fossil shells of the same or allied 

 species ; and perhaps one of the most striking points in the scien- 

 tific value of an extensive collection like Mr. Cuming's arises out 

 of its relation to the present active pursuit of geology, as an in- 

 dispensable instrument to the determination of fossil shells. It is 

 unnecessary to dwell on the importance of well- determined fossils, 

 and especially shells, to a right knowledge of the relative age and 

 position of the stratum in which they were imbedded. Our con- 

 fidence in theories or deductions based upon fossil conchology'must 

 be in the ratio of the extent of the comparison with recent shells 

 that has been gone through in the determination of fossil shells, 

 and especially before sentence of extinction is pronounced upon a 

 species. 



The geologist therefore from scientific motives, and the statesman 

 on economical grounds, are alike concerned in securing for the 

 national zoological collections the completest possible series of recent 

 shells, as forming an indispensable instrument in the scientific ex- 

 position of the structure and riches of the earth. As such, I believe 

 Mr. Cuming's collection to be the best and most complete that ha^ 

 hitherto been made. 



This however is but one of its scientific uses. From the period 



