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TORS OF

DAYS.

of 1865;

turned to Valparaiso, the retired sailmaker found that he Book III, had won fame, as well as many precious rarities in concho- Chap. VI. logy and botany. The Chilian Government gave him BENEFAC special privileges and useful credentials. He then devoted RECENT two years to the thorough exploration of the coasts extending from Chiloë to the Gulf of Conchagua. He botanized Athenaum in plains, marshes and woods; he turned over shingle, and Returns preexplored the crannies of the cliffs, with the patient endur- Parliament, ance of a Californian gold-digger, and was much happier in his companions. In 1831, he returned to England, with a modest but assured livelihood, and with inexhaustible treasures in shells and plants, of which multitudes were theretofore unseen and unknown in Europe.

The year 1831 was a happy epoch for a conchologist. The Zoological Society had just gained a firm footing. BRODERIP and SOWERBY were ready to exhibit and to describe the rich shells of the Pacific. Richard OWEN was eager to anatomize the molluscs, and to write their biography. Some of the novelties brought over by CUMING in 1831 were still yielding new information thirty years afterwards; probably are yielding it still.

In 1835, Mr. CUMING returned to America. He devoted four years to an exhaustive survey of the natural historymore especially, but far from exclusively, the conchology and the botany-of the Philippine group of islands, of Malacca, Singapore, and St. Helena.

CUMING was fitted for his work not more by his scientific ardour and his patient toil-bearing, than by his amiable character. He loved children. His manner was so attractive to them that in some places to which he travelled a schoolful of children were extemporised into botanic missionaries. The joyous band would turn out for a holiday, and would spend the whole of it in searching for the plants,

sented to

v. y.

BOOK III,
Chap. VI.

OTHER
BENEFAC-

TORS OF

RECENT
DAYS.

R. Owen,
On a National
Museum of
Natural His-

tory, pp. 53,

seqq.

Comp. 4the

the shells, and the insects, with the general forms and appearances of which the promoter and rewarder of their voluntary labours had previously familiarised them. He returned to England with such a collection of shells as no previous investigator had brought home; and with about one hundred and thirty thousand specimens of dried plants, besides many curious specimens in other departments.

His collections had been a London marvel before he set out on his third voyage of discovery. He then possessed, I believe, almost sixteen thousand species, and they were regarded as a near approximation to a perfect collection, according to the knowledge of the time. If the writer of the able notice of him which the Athenæum published the Museum immediately after his death was rightly informed, CUMING nearly doubled that number by the results of his final voyage, and by those of subsequent purchases made in Europe.

naum as

above, and

returns of

1865 and subsequent years.

Very naturally, strenuous efforts were made to ensure the perpetuity of this noble collection during its owner's lifetime. The history of those efforts still deserves to be told, and for more than one reason. But it cannot be told here. This inadequate notice of a most estimable man must close with the few words which, three years ago, closed Professor OWEN's annual Report on the Progress of the Zoological Portion of the British Museum. "The disco

veries and labours of Mr. Hugh CUMING,' he then wrote, 'do honour to his country; the fruition of them by Naturalists of all countries now depends mainly on the acquisition of the space required for the due arrangement, exhibition-facility of access and comparison-of the rarities which the Nation has acquired.' And then he adds a small individual instance, as a passing illustration of the value of Mr. CUMING'S lifelong pursuit-Among the choicer raritics, ... brought from the Philippines in 1840, was a specimen

Chap. VI.

BENEFAC-
TORS OF

RECENT

DAYS.

p. 203.

of siliceous sponge (described and figured in the Transac- BOOK III, tions of the Zoological Society), known as Euplectella Asper- OTHER gillum.' Up to the date of Mr. CUMING'S death (tenth August, 1865), this specimen-of what, for non-zoological CEN readers, may be likened to a sort of coral of rare beauty― Transactions, brought over in 1840, was unique. In the year next after &c., vol. ii, the discoverer's death, many fine and curious specimens were sent from the Philippines. The solitary explorer of 1839 had at length been followed by a school of explorers. Such men as CUMING live after their death, and hence the marvellous increase, within a very few years, in our knowledge of Nature, and of God's bounty to the world he made.

J. R.
AND HIS

CHORLEY

COLLECTION
OF THE
SPANISH
POETS AND

Mr. Rutter

By a man who did but little in literature, although he possessed attainments which, in some respects, seem to have surpassed those of a good many men whose lucubrations have had much publicity and vogue, a valuable addition was made a few years ago, by bequest, to the Museum DRAMATISTS. Library, both in the printed and manuscript departments. Mr. John Rutter CHORLEY had collected about two hundred Will of volumes of the Spanish poetry and drama, and had enriched Chorley, 1866. them with manuscript notes, bibliographical and critical. He had also prepared chronological tables of the dramatists-writing them in Spanish, of which he was a master-together with an account of their respective works. He had, I think, contemplated, at some future time, the preparation of some such book on the Spanish theatre as that published by Mr. TICKNOR, many years ago, on Spanish literature at large. Whether the appearance of TICKNOR'S valuable book deterred Mr. CHORLEY from prosecuting his purpose, I know not. Probably he was one of the many men the very extent of whose knowledge inspires a fastidiousness which prompts them to keep on increasing their

BOOK III,
Chap. VI.
OTHER
BENEFAC-

TORS OF
RECENT
DAYS.

GEORGE

WITT AND

H13 COLLEC

TIONS ILLUS

TRATIVE

OF THE

HISTORY OF
SUPERSTI-
TIONS.

private store, and to defer, almost until death overtakes them, the drawing from that store for the Public. If there may really, by some dim possibility, have been here and there an inglorious HAMPDEN, or a mute SHAKESPEARE, it is very certain that there have been, in literary history and in like departments of human study, many an unknown DISRAELI, many a Tom WARTON, brimful of knowledge about poets and poetry, who never could have lived long enough to put to public use the materials he had laboriously brought together.

Of another Collector, whose pursuits lay at an opposite pole to those of Mr. CHORLEY, it would not be edifying to say very much in these pages. Some among the collections. illustrative of the history of obscure superstitions (to quote the polite euphuism of one of the Museum Returns to Parliament) partake, in a degree, of the peculiar associations which connect themselves with the bare name of a place at which some few of them were really found-that too famous retreat of the Emperor TIBERIUS. Others of them, however, possess a real archæological value from a different point of view. All, no doubt, are characteristically illustrative, more or less, of the doings 'in the dark places of the earth,' and may point a moral, howsoever little fitted to adorn a tale. Mr. George WITT, F.R.S., the collector of these curiosities of human error, was a surgeon who had lived much in Australia, and who, on his return from the Colonies, had retired to a provincial town in England, where, at first, he amused his leisure by gathering a small museum of natural history. Of that collection I remember to have seen a printed catalogue, but I imagine that he sold it in his lifetime, as no part of his objects of natural history came, with his other and much more eccentric museum, to the aug

mentation of the public stores. Towards the close of his life he lived in London, and used to amuse himself by exhibiting, and by lecturing upon, what he regarded as the more racy portion of his later collections. He chose (I am told) the hour of eleven o'clock on Sunday morning for such peculiar expositions, but I do not think that these Sunday Lectures' were regarded, either by the man who gave them or by his auditors, as especially fitted for the instruction of the working classes.'

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Book III,
OTHER

Chap. VI.

BENEFAC-
TORS OF

RECENT

DAYS.

CHRISTY

AND ITS

FOUNDER'S

Of a very different calibre to Mr. George WITT was the THK donor of the noble Museum of Ethnography which, for MUSEUM want of room at Bloomsbury, still occupies the late donor's dwelling-house, almost two miles off. It is not too much HISTORY. to say of Henry CHRISTY, that he was both an illustrious man of science and an eminent Christian. The man whose fame as a searcher into antiquity is spread alike over Europe and America, is also remembered in many Irish cabins as one who was willing to spend, lavishly, his health and strength, as well as his money, in lifting up, from squalid beds of straw and filth, poor creatures stricken at once with famine and with fever, and so stricken as sometimes to have almost lost the semblance of humanity. He is also remembered by Algerian peasants, by West African negroes, and by Canadian Indians for like deeds of beneficence. When Prussian insolence and Prussian barbarity struck down Danes who were defending hearth and home, CHRISTY WAS again the open-handed benefactor of the oppressed. When Turks were, in like manner, beating down by sheer brute force the Druses of Syria, Henry CHRISTY was relieving the distressed and the down-trodden in the East, with no less liberality than he had evinced a little while before in relieving them in the North of Europe.

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