tific expeditions and missions, and lately, after many years' strenuous exertion, induced almost all our Indian and Colonial Governments to employ botanists upon the publication of their Floras.

Mr. Hugh Cuming, the well-known Conchologist, died at his residence in Gower Street, on the 10th of August last, at the age of 74. Mr. Cuming was born at West Alvington, Kingsbridge, in the county of Devon, on the 14th of February, 1791. Even as a child his love of plants and of shells displayed itself in a remarkable manner; and under the friendly patronage and encouragement of Col. Montagu, the celebrated author of "Testacea Britannica," who resided in the neighbourhood, it was largely fostered and developed. Apprenticed to a sail-maker, he was brought into contact with seafaring men, and in the year 1819 made a voyage to South America, and settled in business at Valparaiso. Here his passion for collecting shells found an ample field for its development, and was greatly stimulated and assisted by the English Consul, Mr. Nugent, and by several officers of the British Navy; among others, by Lieut. Frembly and the officers of the surveying ships under the command of Capts. King and FitzRoy. In 1826 he gave up his business in order to devote himself wholly to his favourite pursuit. With this object he built a yacht, expressly fitted for the collection and stowage of objects of Natural History; and a cruise of upwards of twelve months among the islands of the South Pacific amply rewarded him for his toils in dredging and collecting by sea and shore. On his return to Valparaiso, he prepared for a voyage of more extended duration along the western coast of America; and his reputation being now widely extended, he started under peculiar advantages. The Chilian Government granted him the privilege of anchoring in its ports free of charges, and of purchasing stores free of duty, and he was furnished with letters to the authorities of all the States which he visited, who, in consequence, received him with marked attention, and gave him every possible facility.

After two years spent in exploring the coast from the Island of Chiloe, in lat. 44° S., to the Gulf of Conchagua, in lat. 13° N., dredging, while under sail and at anchor, in the bays and inlets, searching among the rocks, turning over the stones at low water, and rambling inland over the plains, river banks, and woods, Mr. Cuming returned with all his accumulated stores of plants and animals to his native land. The Zoological Society had just previously been

established, and it was in 1831 that its evening scientific meetings began to be enlivened by the brilliant displays of new shells from his cabinet, which were described by the late Mr. Broderip and the late Mr. G. B. Sowerby; while the anatomy of some of the more interesting mollusks formed the subject of papers by Prof. Owen. For four-and-thirty years his unrivalled collection has continued to supply fresh novelties for these meetings, and the supply is still far from being exhausted. In 1835 he determined to undertake a new expedition, and fixed upon the Philippine Islands, rich in natural productions, little explored, and where his knowledge of Spanish would be of great advantage, as the scene of his labours. Letters of recommendation from the authorities at Madrid to the GovernorGeneral at Manilla, to the governors of the various provinces into which the islands are divided, and to the Archbishop of Manilla, procured him a hospitable welcome among all ranks, but especially among the clergy, wherever he presented himself. Although his dredgings and wanderings by the sea-shore were by no means inconsiderable, his attention was now more particularly directed to the woods and forests of these luxuriant islands, and in them he reaped a most abundant harvest of plants, and filled his store-chests with innumerable specimens of such a magnificent series of land-shells as had never before rewarded the exertions of a collector. In every locality Mr. Cuming became the guest of the Padre or priest, always the chief personage of the district, in the interior of these islands. Their houses and equipages were placed at his disposal, and, what was of still greater importance, the services of the school-children, educated at the expense of the Spanish Government, and numbering in some places as many as four or five hundred, were secured to scour the woods for snails and plants. Small bribes of money were most effectual in directing the lynx-eyes of these youthful collectors to the detection of such as were especially pointed out to their notice, and shells which gladdened the collector's eyes by their exceeding novelty and beauty were brought to him day by day in quantities which seemed prodigious. After four years spent among the islands of the Philippine group, and short visits to Malacca, Singapore, and St. Helena, Mr. Cuming returned to England with the richest booty that had ever been collected by a single man. His dried plants, which numbered 130,000 specimens, were immediately distributed, as well as his living orchids, which were numerous and of great beauty. Large numbers of birds and reptiles, quadrupeds and insects, were

also added to the museums at home and abroad. But his collection of shells formed by far the most important part of the spoils which he had secured. Before leaving England he had brought together, through his Pacific and South American collections, and by means of purchase and exchange, the largest and most valuable private collection then in existence. His vast Philippine collections enabled him to increase this to an enormous extent; and during the five-and-twenty years that have elapsed, he has been untiringly engaged in its arrangement and completion, in adding to it by purchase and exchange, and in getting the species described and figured by conchologists, both at home and abroad. It is stated by Mr. Reeve that it contains not fewer than 30,000 species and varieties, and in most cases several specimens of each.

Mr. Samuel P. Woodward, Ph.D., A.L.S., F.G.S., AssistantPalæontologist in the British Museum, and Examiner in Natural Sciences to the Council of Military Education, died on the 8th of July last, at the early age of 44 years. Mr. Woodward was born September 17, 1821. He was the second son of the late Samuel Woodward of Norwich, well known to geologists and antiquaries as the author of Geology of Norfolk,' (1833); Synoptical Table of British Organic Remains,' (1830); a 'History of Norwich Castle,' (posthumous, 1847), and various papers in the Archæologia' of the Society of Antiquaries. Shortly after his father's death, he was temporarily employed (in 1838) in the library of the British Museum, and in 1839 succeeded Mr. Searles Wood, as Sub-curator of the Geological Society of London, and was elected a Member of the Botanical Society, and an Associate of the Linnean. In 1845 he was appointed Professor of Botany and Geology in the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, and became one of the Founders of the Cotteswold Naturalists' Field Club. In 1848 he was made firstclass Assistant in the department of Geology and Mineralogy in the British Museum. He published but one independent work, a Manual of Recent and Fossil Shells,' of which the first part appeared in 1851, and the two following in 1853 and 1856. This has been used or recommended as a text-book by nearly every Professor of Natural History and of Geology in Great Britain; while in America it has obtained a very extensive circulation.

The small Geological Map of England, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, was prepared in 1843 by Mr. Woodward, under the superintendence of Sir R. I. Murchison;

and Professor Owen acknowledged his assistance in the Invertebrate portion of his Palæontology.' Dr. Woodward contributed several important papers to the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,' 'Proceedings of the Zoological Society,' 'Recreative Science,''Annals and Magazine of Natural History,' &c. The article Volcanoes' in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' the scientific reviews in the 'Critic' of 1860, and the Athenæum' reports of proceedings in the Geological Sections of the British Association, from 1841 to 1856, are amongst his minor contributions to Geological literature.

6

These Memoirs exhibit the vast acquaintance with the recent forms of Mollusca possessed by their author, and afford strong evidence of the philosophical cast of his mind, and his talent in determining the zoological relations of obscure organisms. One of his most remarkable achievements in this line of research was his determination of the true affinities of the extinct family of Rudistes, published in the XIth volume of the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society; and the Society showed its appreciation of the merits and value of his memoir on that subject by awarding him the proceeds of the Wollaston donation fund in the year 1854; and again in 1857, on this account, and to assist him in his researches in the class Radiata.

He was a member of the Council of the Geological Society from 1859, and had recently been appointed one of the Examiners in Geology and Palæontology to the University of London.

Although his published works may, for a man of his acknowledged merit and position in the scientific world, appear to be small, they represent only a portion of the original work that he performed; many of the results he arrived at must unhappily have died with him, but others remain in the form of carefully prepared manuscripts, which his brothers entertain the hope of publishing. It may be a matter of surprise that he did so little in making known the results of his investigations; but for the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from chronic asthma, which eventually became so distressing as to awaken the sympathies of all, and caused many to marvel at the energy he displayed in research and conversation during intervals of release from pain.

An attack of acute bronchitis which occasioned the rupture of an artery in the lungs, was the immediate cause of his death, at Herne Bay, (whither he had gone in the hope of benefit to his health), on the 11th of July last.

LII. PROCEEDINGS OF THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES OF LONDON.

1. ETHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY. (4, St. Martin's Place.)

May 9th, 1865.

THE papers read were:-1. "On Language and Ethnology." By the Rev. F. W. Farrar. The views of the author were that the diversity of languages was primordial, and that they originated at different geographical centres. The search for the primitive language has come to be regarded as a vagary to be ranked with the attempts to discover the quadrature of the circle or the primum mobile. But obviously, if all languages were derived from one, that one must have been the primitive language, and ought, therefore, with our present philological knowledge, to be easily discoverable. Accordingly, whole volumes have been written on the subject, and among many languages, Low Dutch, Swedish, Basque, Irish, and Polynesian, have all been claimants for the honour of having been the language of Paradise, and it has even been supposed that the primitive language was restored at Pentecost. Hebrew, however, has been the most persistent candidate, and nothing was easier than the proof of its pretensions. It was simply this: all were descended from Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve spoke Hebrew, therefore Hebrew is the primitive language. But this syllogism lost sight of the fact that the Hebrews were among the very few nations who had considered the problem of the diversity of tongues, and that in the passage which deals with the subject, they attributed the fact to direct confusion miraculously introduced into all human speech.

Many eminent ethnologists have been jealous of the encroachment of philology on their domain, but the author thought philology and ethnology ought to be sister studies, and that though they worked separately, their conclusions should be combined. That there is one small family of languages united by the closest affinities, Hebrew, Phoenician, Chaldee, Samaritan, Syriac, and Arabic, has always been recognized; and to this family the faulty, but not inconvenient and conventional name of Semitic has been given. The discovery of Sanskrit brought to our notice a language coeval with, if not anterior to, the Hebrew, and utterly distinct from it-a language