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 pur.suit 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 Pmgland, in 1831, 
scientific conchologists have there found subjects 
without intermission for their desciiptions, and 
