152 
Miscellaneous. 
when the Atlantic, American and Polynesian departments of this 
collection reached England in 1831, scientific conchologists have 
there found subjects without intermission for their descriptions ; and 
the novelties were far from being exhausted, when Mr. Cuming, 
having undertaken a third voyage in prosecution of his favourite 
science, returned in 1840 from Manilla, freighted with the concho- 
logical riches of the Indian Ocean, which have subsequently kept 
the pens of competent describers of new genera and species actively 
at work, and will so supply them for years to come : thus the Cu- 
mingian collection has directly advanced the science of conchology 
in an unexampled degree, and possesses the same peculiar claims 
upon the Government and Custodians of the National Museum in 
this country which Linnaeus’s Herbarium did upon the Swedish 
State. Mr. Cuming’s collection contains, for example, the originals 
from which many hundreds of new species of shells have been de- 
scribed in the scientific periodicals or systematic works published 
since its arrival in this country. 
Any doubt that may arise through the incompleteness of the de- 
scription, or from the inapprehensiveness of the student, may be de- 
cided at once by reference to the original specimens. These ‘ types 
of the species ’ become therefore an instrument of great importance 
to the progress of the science in the country in which they are pre- 
served and made accessible. The price asked by the executors of 
Linnseus was deemed by the authorities in Sweden too high for the 
great botanist’s dried herbs, and you well know what happened. 
When better knowledge and consideration had awakened a due sense 
of their value, it was too late ; an enterprising Englishman had 
struck the bargain with the widow. The Swedish government sent 
a frigate in chase of the vessel on board which Sir James Edward 
Smith had embarked the precious herbarium, but without success. 
It now forms the choicest treasure of the museum of the Linneean 
Society, and continues to be of peculiar value as affording botanists 
the means of ascertaining with certainty the synonyms of the wri- 
tings of Linnaeus. 
An English naturalist may be pardoned for citing this well-known 
incident in the light of a warning, when further delay in securing for 
the nation the Cumingian types of new species of shells may involve 
the necessity of crossing the Atlantic in order to compare and verify 
the descriptions and synonyms of Broderip, Sowerby, Gray, and 
other eminent conchologists. 
To the physiologist the Cumingian collection has a value beyond 
any other now in Europe, from the circumstance of its possessor 
having endeavoured to exemplify each species by a series of shells of 
different ages, as well as by the chief varieties which result from the 
influence of peculiar external circumstances. 
The extent to which Mr. Cuming has carried out this truly philo- 
sophical aim of elucidating his favourite department of nature is 
very remarkable, and renders his collection most important and sug- 
gestive in its bearings upon the higher generalizations of zoological 
science, touching the nature of species and the circumstances and 
