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9.

The number of lots registered at this time amounted to 18,103. Many of these were the types which had been sent back by Carpenter and Cuming, fortunately for the most part not mounted, and still packed up. In the midst of all the confusion due to the fire Dr. Stimpson's Monograph on the Hydrobünae and other conchological publications were issued by the Institution. 

It was at this time, in March, 1865, that the present curator was first introduced to the collection, to which he had been an occasional contributor in previous years. It was shortly after the fire. The blackened walls, the huddled and more or less smoked-up cases, crowded into insufficient space; little dark workrooms in queer corners, where lurked students and engravers or draughtsmen, and where inspiring symposia on all sorts of scientific topics were nightly held, in a somewhat creosotic atmosphere; the occasional discovery of a supposed lost rarity, hidden under a mantle of flakes of burned paper [[strikethrough]] now [[/strikethrough]] and [[strikethrough]] then [[/strikethrough]] extatically recognized by Stimpson or Kennicott; and the Bohemian flavor of the steamed oysters eaten in a rough shed by the (happily now extinct) canal [[strikethrough]] and [[/strikethrough]] luxurious to palates stimulated by a nearly universal deficiency of lunch-money; all these awakened feelings for which