Page 4. June-July-Aug. 1978 _No. 243 __ NEW__YORK SHELL CLUB Norns 
BARBOZA DU BOCAGE MUSEUM DESTROYED BY FIRE 
(The following letter was received by Dottie and Bob Janowsky and js 
printed here with their permission. - Ed.) 
From: Ilidio A V Félix Alves 
Praceta Eduardo Pereira Roque 
lote 1, R/C, frente 
S. Pedro do Estoril 
Portugal. 
Dear Bob and Dottie: 
This letter was planned to be completely different but I am forced 
to rewrite it. 
In fact last Friday to Saturday night a great fire destroyed practi- 
cally all the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon. 
In order to prevent the destruction of all the neighbourhood the 
firemen had to protect the chemistry department and in the meanwhile 
the fire rose to such proportions in the Natural History Department 
that it was impossible to save it. From the once very good Barboza 
du Bocage Museum nothing was left but the walls. All the extraor- 
dinary collection of African birds is lost, along with the very good 
collection of fishes (with some unique specimens of extinct species, 
holotypes, etc.), the collection of reptiles, the shell collection, 
etc., etc., etc., with the books, papers, personal notes of people 
working there, even a PhD thesis almost complete was destroyed. 
We had planned to begin with the study (and the second volume of 
"Seashells of Cape Verde Islands" in the case of Dr. Monteiro and 
Mr. Burnay) of Portuguese and West African malacological fauna. 
Everything was prepared and planned. 
We have no Tryon, Reeve or Kiener, no Dunker, Dautzenberg, no Pro- 
ceedings, Journals, no Abstracts, no files, nothing. 
When I read for the first time (in "Johnsonia") about the destruc- 
tion of the Chicago Museum in 1871, when all the papers and notes 
of Stimpson were lost, along with all the loaned material, shells 
and books, I thought that that might have been like something out 
of this world happening to him. We now experienced the same. 
When I was writing all that, I began thinking that perh u could 
do us a favor (that is beyond ee ciah Futitee mee Seeder 
or perhaps you have dy, the 
addresses of all the people that are osc ine or Flerov sro ah 
git. Sometimes they have extra specimens of their papers. 
ri ee be very kind of you if you ask to those friends of yours, 
at you usually meet, or correspond with, if they would be so kind 
eae send ie us duplicates of their papers on malacology, if they 
pe ptt oe berries ba going to write to the Institutions all 
Nani wor ut that will take a lot of time and sometimes the 
sere utions do not have available papers that the authors still 
ede Pye tae is to remember them all and to get their ad- 
are eee Sa j ponee appreciate to be in touch With Abbott, Kohn, Nib- 
7a aiehe e ae lench, etc. etc. If someone kindly wishes to send 
p On other subjects I will forward them to the right persons. 
