Hugh Cuming (1791-1865) Prince of collectors

was responsible for the remarkable increase in our knowledge of the natural world during the nineteenth century. For every man of action prepared to risk his life in foreign parts there was a dozen armchair students eager to publish descriptions and illustrations of the plants and animals he brought home. Among nineteenth-century men of action few contributed as much to the material advance of natural history as Hugh Cuming (1791 —1865) and none has received such an unequal press. A widely accepted picture of the man is contained in a popular and much acclaimed book1 published in the 1930s: The research after the rare, a quasi-commercial, quasi-scientific research, is typified, glorified and carried to the point of exhausting the fun of the game, in the career of the excellent Englishman Hugh Cuming, a wealthy amateur, who set out in a private yacht to cruise the world for new shells, something to tickle the jaded fancy of the European collector in his castle or parsonage or shell-shop. In the Philippines Cuming sent native collectors into the jungles after tropical tree snails, and saw one fellow returning with a sack full from which specimens (every one possibly a genus new to science)