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Show 1892.] SPECIMENS FORMERLY IN T H E JEUDE COLLECTION. 309 2. On the probable Identity of certain Specimens, formerly in the Lidth de Jeude Collection, and now in the British Museum, with those figured by Albert Seba in his f Thesaurus ' of 1734. By OLDPIELD THOMAS. [Eeceived April 5, 1892.] In 1867 the British Museum purchased, through the late Mr. R . Damon, a large quantity of zoological specimens of all sorts out of the collection of Prof. Th. van Lidth de Jeude of Utrecht. Of the mammals, about 280 are preserved entire in old-fashioned glass jars with red wax tops, and 330 are skulls. In the well-known folio work by Albert Seba, ' Locupletissimus rerum naturalium Thesaurus,' vol. i., there is a frontispiece with the author's portrait, and behind him are specimens in bottles so exactly like those of the Lidth de Jeude collection as to have attracted my attention to the circumstance ; and although it has since proved that such bottles were used by Lidth de Jeude himself and others, yet as the suspicion thus aroused was confirmed by my finding some of the specimens to be similar to the animals figured by Seba in this work, a thorough examination has been made, with the startling and unhoped for result of showing that many of these Lidth de Jeude specimens are actually the very individual examples figured by Seba. Of course, one or two, or even five or six cases of resemblance might have been put down to accidental coincidences, but so large a number prove to correspond in every way to Seba's figures and descriptions, that I no longer have a doubt as to their being really Seba's specimens, carefully preserved by their successive possessors in the original hermetically sealed jars in which he placed them. Naturally, in the course of time, many have been lost, others have deteriorated and been destroyed, and others again have been alienated in ignorance of their special value and interest. But in spite of all, enough remain to raise their resemblance to Seba's figures far beyond the region of accidental coincidence, and, as each specimen identified increases the probabilities for the identification of the rest, in the aggregate to amount practically to a proof of the opinion now advocated. In fact the whole British Museum collection from other sources could not produce so many close resemblances to Seba's figures as occur in this one collection of Lidth de Jeude. It may be noted that, judging by the old tickets on the bottles, there appear to be t^o sets of specimens in the collection-the bottles of the one labelled with large printed numbers, and of the other with manuscript numbers, evidently of an earlier date; all the cases of asserted identity occur in the latter part of the collection, an evidence in itself that these have some common bond of origin. At the same time the importance of this piece of evidence is unfortunately much weakened by the fact that many of the identified specimens have PROC. ZOOL. Soc-1892, No. XXII. 22 |