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Show 1867.] DR. J. E. GRAY ON THE CALYPTRCEIDCE. 729 shown by the offer that was made to me respecting the new Volute ; and private collections have been much enriched by such labours. No one knew better than Mr. Cuming the value of a new name to his specimens, as shown by his enmity to any one who doubted the novelty of the species described. He would not allow me to see his collection for many years after his return from South America, because I had pointed out to him at one of the meetings of this Society that some of the shells which Messrs. Sowerby and Broderip had described as new were well-known species, and well figured by Chemnitz. Indeed I was not allowed to see any part of his collection until it was first offered to the British Museum for sale, during his illness about sixteen years ago. Since that period Mr. Cuming refused a well-known conchologist, who had previously described several shells from his cabinet, any further use of his collection, because he refused to admit that certain specimens which he sent to him to be described were new to science, or different from species already described. The system that Mr. Cuming adopted of selecting three specimens of each variety or species most alike tended to prevent the number of nominal or presumed species from being observed during a casual examination of the collection, as it excluded those specimens which showed the transition from one variety to another which occurs in any given species-more especially as the species were not arranged in the drawers so that the most allied or presumed species were near to each other, but, on the contrary, the two or more variations of the same species were often placed as species in distant parts of the series. The fact of a naturalist having the power of merely adding his name after the name of an animal or plant described has been supposed to have influenced many in attempting to establish species, or in altering the names of old species on very slight grounds; but if we add to this little vanity the greater inducement of an increase in the value of the specimens themselves and the collection in which they are contained, or of increasing the sale of the book in which they are described and figured, or, further, if a naturalist is to be paid so much per species for all the species he can describe from a collection, it is not difficult to believe, under these various circumstances, that the number of the species in such a collection are very needlessly increased. This has caused so many nominal species to be created by collectors of ferns and other plants and by nurserymen ; but such names are rarely regarded as of any authority by scientific botanists. I have had the shells of the Cumingian collection placed on tablets so that they may be arranged in the same series as the other shells in the British Museum; but each tablet is marked in such a manner that it may be at once distinguished from the rest of the collection, so that there can be no doubt about which are the types or the presumed types of the species described from the collection. I feared that, if the shells were not placed on tablets, the specimens of the same species might be separated from their allies and mixed with PROC. ZOOL. Soc-1867, No. XLVII. |
