1848-49 APPEAL TO DEAN BUCKLAND 315 



native seas, shores, lakes, rivers and forests the 

 marine, fluviatile, 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 casualties to which such a 

 collection in such a place is subject without a 

 shudder. . . . Perhaps one of the most striking 

 points in the estimate of the scientific value of an 

 extensive collection like Mr. Cuming's, arises out 

 of its relation to the present active pursuit of 

 Geology as an indispensable instrument to the 

 determination of fossil shells. No one can give 

 higher sanction than yourself to any expression 

 of 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 embedded ; and the geologists' con- 

 fidence in results based upon fossil conchology 

 must be in the ratio of the extent of the com- 

 parison with recent shells that has been gone 

 through in the determination of the fossil shells, 

 and especially before a species is pronounced to 

 be extinct. . . . 



' This, however, is but one of its scientific 

 uses. From the period when the Atlantic, 

 American, and Polynesian departments of the 

 Cumingian Collection reached England, in 1831, 

 scientific conchologists have there found subjects 

 without intermission for their descriptions, and 



