tebrates in the regions which the Godeffroy collectors have visited; and what gives it peculiar value is its reliable indication of the locality of the specimen, coming as it does from a trained collector sending direct to the establishment. The fifth catalogue, issued in 1874, is a pamphlet of 252 pages, and notes, in close print, the name, author, locality, and price, in Prussian currency, of about 9,600 species of insects, crustaceans, mollusks, echinoderms, coelenterates, and protozoans, besides several hundred vertebrates. Much of this invertebrate material is in alcohol. The skillful use of this, by both collector and curator, has allowed the preservation of a large series of forms which are seldom offered for sale at a natural history establishment. Such are beautiful coral-polyps and other zoophytes, physalias, velellas, pyrosomes, salpidæ, ascidians, holothurians, arachnidæ, minute crustaceans, polyzoöans, tunicates, and many other forms of extremest interest to the student, but heretofore rarely obtainable. In a word, the Museum Godeffroy, as now conducted, is a vast storehouse of material available for the cabinets and laboratories of working naturalists and teachers of comparative zoölogy in all parts of the world. It affords a splendid opportunity to our college professors to obtain those forms so needed in a systematic course of zoölogical lectures or in rounding out the ordinal divisions in their museums.
It may be wondered that so little has been known of this Hamburg "Zoölogical Comptoir" in America. The reason is to be found in the extreme (we had almost said unfortunate) delicacy of Herr Godeffroy, who has never been willing in any way to publish this as a commercial establishment; even the catalogue gives only on one page, accidentally as it were, the facts that the objects are for sale.
The enterprise is carried on purely in the interests of scientific discovery at a yearly expense, beyond returns, of several thousand dollars. The staff of collectors, equipped and kept in the field, is very large. Among those specially engaged at present are the following:
Herr Hildebrand is dredging in the southern part of the Red Sea and along the east coast of Africa, and interior in the Somali land, a region whose fauna is little known. Herr Darnel is at work in Eastern Australia, having passed through Queensland and penetrated three hundred miles into the interior, obtaining strange forms of mollusks and that strangest of fishes—the Ceratodus Fosteri. Six of these fishes, about two feet long, have been secured by him, and six German museums have got these ichthyological treasures at two hundred Prussian thalers each. Also in Australia. Frau Dietrich, a second Madame Pfeiffer, for the last ten years has been traveling and collecting for the Godeffroy Museum. Her collections of insects are astonishing in the number of new forms brought to light. In the rapturous South-Sea Islands—Samoa, Viti, Pelew, Society, Marshall, and others—Herr Kubarz and Dr. Garret have resided for more than ten years, cruising from island to island and making magnificent collections of polyps,
