314 PROFESSOR OWEN CH. x. 



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 and Professor than in 

 busy London. . . . Mr. Cuming in his annual visits 

 to the Continent carries with him the inferior 

 duplicates of his rarities, representing 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 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 ob- 

 tained this conchological wealth is as novel and 

 exemplary as the result is important and mar- 

 vellous, 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 to arduous and 

 hazardous personal exertion — dredging, diving, 

 wading, wandering, under the equator and 

 through the tropics to the temperate zones, both 

 north and south, in the Atlantic, in the Pacific, 

 in the Indian Ocean and in the islands of its rich 

 archipelago — in the labour of obtaining from their 



