314 
PROFESSOR OWEN 
cu. 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 o,r 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. Cumins has ob- 
O 
tainecl 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 
