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investigated. On their arrival in the United States they were taken in charge by a gentleman appointed rather on account of his popularity than because he had any knowledge of natural history or museum work. The alcoholic specimens were taken out of the tanks in which they had been placed and put into expensive glass stoppered jars. If left alone they would have done very well and have been the most valuable collection for the study of geographical distribution of invertebrates ever made up to that time. It seems that, owing to the impurity of the tin of which the tags for spirit specimens were made, a slight corrosion took place which gave a whitish tint to the alcohol. The ingenious custodian perceived this and proceeded carefully to extract all the tags and put them in a bottle by themselves, without replacing them by others, or recording the numbers so that the jars could afterward be identified. When the present curator first became acquainted with the collection this jar of tin tags was preserved with it, a melancholy monument to the stupidity of the custodian. 

The same gentleman amused himself by taking the crabs out of their jars and pinning them on boards which were exposed to the light and to such