ntacrinae, comatules, asterophons, echini,
holothuri, etc., represented individually a complete collection of this
group.

A somewhat nervous conchyliologist would certainly have fainted before
other more numerous cases, in which were classified the specimens of
molluscs. It was a collection of inestimable value, which time fails me
to describe minutely. Amongst these specimens I will quote from memory
only the elegant royal hammer-fish of the Indian Ocean, whose regular
white spots stood out brightly on a red and brown ground, an imperial
spondyle, bright-coloured, bristling with spines, a rare specimen in
the European museums--(I estimated its value at not less than L1000); a
common hammer-fish of the seas of New Holland, which is only procured
with difficulty; exotic buccardia of Senegal; fragile white bivalve
shells, which a breath might shatter like a soap-bubble; several
varieties of the aspirgillum of Java, a kind of calcareous tube, edged
with leafy folds, and much debated by amateurs; a whole series of
trochi, some a greenish-yellow, found in the American seas, others a
reddish-brown, natives of Australian waters; others from the Gulf of
Mexico, remarkable for their imbricated shell; stellari found in the
Southern Seas; and last, the rarest of all, the magnificent spur of New
Zealand; and every description of delicate and fragile shells to which
science has given appropriate names.

Apart, in separate compartments, were spread out chaplets of pearls of
the greatest beauty, which reflected the electric light in little
sparks of fire; pink pearls, torn from the pinna-marina of the Red Sea;
green pearls of the haliotyde iris; yellow, blue and black pearls, the
curious productions of the divers molluscs of every ocean, and certain
mussels of the water-courses of the North; lastly, several specimens of
inestimable value which had been gathered from the rarest pintadines.
Some of these pearls were larger than a pigeon's egg, and were worth as
much, and more than that which the traveller Tavernier sold to the Shah
of Persia for three millions, and surpassed the one in the possession
of the Imaum of Muscat, which I had believed to be unrivalled in the
world.

Therefore, to estimate the value of this collection was simply
impossible. Captain Nemo must have expended millions in the
acquirement of these various specimens, and I was thinking what source
he could have drawn from, to have been able thus to gratify his fa