8 
In his historical sketch of the Society, Bouve (l88o) reported 
that the Bailey Collection consisted of 1,839 slides, a figure almost 
identical to that inthel877 Annual Report, 
The Society’s Annual Report of 1892 contained a description of 
the "present condition" of the Bailey Collection: 2k boxes of "about 
87 ^ slides, in fairly good condition," about 568 slides in odd boxes 
and parcels plus an additional 27 slides labelled by Durkee (Proc. 
Boston Soc. nat. Hist. 25:438-439* 1892 .). The parcels were 
described as "loose bundles, [containing] l 60 native and 71 foreign 
diatom-slides." This description indicates there were 1,469 slides 
in the collection. 
During the late l850 |, s and l860 f s, the Proceedings of the Society 
alludes occasionally to the collection being less well organized than 
it might be and to its being heavily used and borrowed from, especially 
shortly after its receipt by the Society. H.L. Smith ( 1872 ) reported 
in The Lens concerning the Bailey Collection that 
...the slides of Diatomaceae, and more especially 
the crude materials left by him [Bailey], have not 
been so fortunate in escaping the grasp of greedy 
collectors. Perhaps I am mistaken, but either the 
collection of Prof. Bailey, which he gave the 
Society, was much more meagre than that I had seen 
at his own rooms at West Point, or it has suffered 
since its deposit. 
DeToni ( 1891 ) notes also, possibly based on Smith’s earlier remarks, 
that the Society’s Collection "Devrait contenir tous les types de 
J.W. Bailey, mais la plupart ont ete vole." 
A summary of the estimates of the extent of the Bailey Collection 
involving diatoms is presented in Table 2. No records other than those 
described above have been found useful in determining the extent of the 
