Previous - next
of corals--in short, every species of those curious polypi of which
entire islands are formed, which will one day become continents. Of the
echinodermes, remarkable for their coating of spines, asteri, sea-stars,
pantacrinae, comatules, asterophons, echini, holothuri, etc.,
represented individually a complete collection of this group.
A somewhat nervous conchyliologist would certainly have fainted before
other more numerous cases, in which were classified the specimens of
molluscs. It was a collection of inestimable value, which time fails me
to describe minutely. Amongst these specimens I will quote from memory
only the elegant royal hammer-fish of the Indian Ocean, whose regular
white spots stood out brightly on a red and brown ground, an imperial
spondyle, bright-coloured, bristling with spines, a rare specimen in the
European museums--(I estimated its value at not less than £1000); a
common hammer-fish of the seas of New Holland, which is only procured
with difficulty; exotic buccardia of Senegal; fragile white bivalve
shells, which a breath might shatter like a soap-bubble; several
varieties of the aspirgillum of Java, a kind of calcareous tube, edged
with leafy folds, and much debated by amateurs; a whole series of
trochi, some a greenish-yellow, found in the American seas, others a
reddish-brown, natives of Australian waters; others from the Gulf of
Mexico, remarkable for their imbricated shell; stellari found in the
Southern Seas; and last, the rarest of all, the magnificent spur of New
Zealand; and every description of delicate and fragile shells to which
science has given appropriate names.
Apart, in separate compartments, were spread out chaplets of pearls of
the greatest beauty, which reflected the electric light in little sparks
of fire; pink pearls, torn from the pinna-marina of the Red Sea; green
pearls of the haliotyde iris; yellow, blue and black pearls, the curious
productions of the divers molluscs of every ocean, and certain mussels
of the water-courses of the North; lastly, several specimens of
inestimable value which had been gathered from the rarest pintadines.
Some of these pearls were larger than a pigeon's egg, and were worth as
Previous - next
