Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/720

700 the fresh arrivals. Specialists were also enlisted to work up each department, identifying the old and describing the new. Thus some of the most distinguished German naturalists were employed in this great storehouse of Nature's wonders. Some of them even found here opportunities for wider comparison of species than in the Royal Museums at home.

In other cases material was sent to the highest authorities in the various classes. Profs. Kölliker and Spengel, for example, have worked up the mammals; Sharpe (of the British Museum) and Drs. Hartlaub, Finsch, and Gräffe, the birds; Prof. Peters, the amphibians; Dr. Günther, the fishes; Semper, the insects; Dunker, Monson, Martens, and Garret, the mollusks; Lütken, the echinoderms; Dr. Kirchenpauer, Kölliker, and Semper, the cœlenterates; and Dr. Ehlers, the protozoans.

This plan, most liberally sustained, has resulted in giving the Godeffroy Museum a high place among the cabinets of Europe for its many type-specimens and novelties. The duplicates were freely distributed to institutions of science in the Fatherland, and to many specialists beyond it. This munificence in thus aiding investigators is a theme of praise among professional zoölogists on the Continent. Many of the discoveries among the lower forms of marine life which have enriched German science during the last two decades may be credited to the Hamburg storehouse. Rarely have wealth and liberality been combined in a way more grateful to working naturalists; and never did science indirectly receive greater material benefit from one not himself an investigator. For Herr Godeffroy is a merchant, spending most of his time in his counting-room and at the Bourse, and superintending cargoes which unite Hamburg with nearly every part of the world. He visits his museum for an hour or two as a weekly recreation, looking over the beautiful forms, and hearing from his corps of workers their most noteworthy observations. It is a phenomenon too rare in America; nor is it common even in more intellectual Europe to find commerce and science thus sharing the attention of the same mind. A Berlin naturalist, who was in a position to know, told the writer that Herr Godeffroy had for many years in the early part of his enterprise expended not less than from six to eight thousand thalers each year in procuring and working up his natural history material. It was perhaps to lessen the burden of this outgo by an income, and to make the institution in part self-supporting and therefore more permanent, that in 1865 (?) the founder decided to offer for sale to European naturalists his stores of duplicate material already acquired and daily coming in. For this purpose a carefully-prepared catalogue of the Museum Godeffroy was issued, with a detailed list of the species in classified order, giving the author and locality, and the catalogue number which follows the specimen when it goes forth. This catalogue is in itself an almost exhaustive list of marine