The Natural History of the Bahamas ¹

Abstract

TWO years ago there was published in this country an account of a cruise to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands² by an American party for the purpose of obtaining natural history and ethnological specimens for the National Museum at Washington, and every Englishman worthy the name who read that work can scarcely have failed to experience a feeling of shame that it was not long ago anticipated and rendered superfluous by the enterprise of his own countrymen. If such a feeling exist in the case of a work dealing in a more or less cursory manner with the results of a private expedition to remote islands of little or no commercial importance, how must it be intensified when we find an American scientific society undertaking a systematic biological, geological, historical, and sociological survey of a group of islands which are supposed to rank among the more important possessions of the British Crown?