snails, too, Poey and his associate, Dr. Gundlach, were able to act
with certainty, as all the species then known were included in the
“Monographium Heliceorum Viventium” of Dr. Ludwig Pfeiffer.
In the year 1842 Poey was appointed to the professorship of Comparative Anatomy and Zoology in the Royal University of Havana, which chair he still holds, after forty-two years.
The University of Havana occupies an ancient monastery building in the heart of the city. Like most similar edifices in Cuba and Spain, it is a low building around a hollow paved court, and its whitewashed, time-stained walls have an air of great antiquity. The university has now some twelve hundred students, the great majority of whom are in those departments which lead toward wealth, or social or political preferment, as law, medicine, and pharmacy. Comparatively few pursue literary or philosophical studies, and still fewer are interested in the biological sciences. In the department of botany there are now but two students, and the number in zoology is probably not much greater.
Although Professor Poey is evidently held in very high respect in the university, in which he has long been dean of the faculty of science, I can not imagine that he ever received much help or sympathy in his scientific work from that quarter, or indeed from any other in Cuba. His friends and countrymen are doubtless glad to be of assistance to so amiable a gentleman as the Señor Don Felipe, but for the claims of science the people of Cuba, as a class, care very little.
The university library contains but little which could be of help in Professor Poey's zoölogical studies. He has therefore been compelled to gather a private library of ichthyology. This library has with time become very rich and valuable, many of his co-workers in the study of fishes, notably Dr. Bleeher, having presented him with complete series of their published works.
The museum of the university occupies two little rooms, the one devoted chiefly to Cuban minerals, the other containing mostly mammals, birds, and fishes mounted by Poey himself in the earlier days of his professorship. The number of these is not great, nor have many additions been made during the last twenty years. Of late the types of the new species described by Professor Poey have been, after being fully studied by him and represented in life-size drawings, mostly sent to other museums, notably to the United States National Museum, to the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy and to the Museum of Madrid. Duplicates have been rarely retained in Havana, the cost of keeping up a permanent collection being too great. As a result of this, Professor Poey's work has sometimes suffered from lack of means of comparing specimens taken at different times. There is no zoölogical laboratory in Cuba except the private study of Professor Poey, and here, for want of room and for other reasons, drawings have, to a great extent, taken the place of specimens.
The publication of the observations of Professor Poey on the
