as Acapulco, Mexico. Concluding the trip, Cuming returned to England. The Philippines In 1835 he made ready for another exploration, this time to the Philippines. He continued to collect shells there but he also became interested in the rich and varied flora of the islands. In his four years of combing the Philippines, Singapore, St. Helena, and the Malacca areas, he collected magnificent series of the shells of land snails. He was aided greatly in these collections by hiring the services of local schoolchildren, who gladly scoured the wood and forests for plants and snails. This enabled him to assemble the richest collection gathered by a single individual up to that time. It included 130,000 specimens of dried plant material, 30,000 conchological species and varieties, large numbers of birds, reptiles, quadrupeds and insects, and numerous living orchid plants, thirty-three of them species previously unknown to science. In the Philippine Journal of Science he is quoted as stating: " The greatest object of my ambition is to place my collection in the British Museum that it may be accessible to all the scientific world and where it would afford to the public eye a striking example of what has been done by the personal industry and means of one man. " Toward this end, in later years he financed several collectors to carry on the same work. His orchid discoveries were numerous, and he became the first to ship living orchids successfully from Manila to England. A number of orchids bear his name: Coelogyne cumingii, Podochilus cumingii, etc. The tree fern Cibotium cumingii is also named after Cuming. Cuming is commemorated in the scientific names of five species of Philippine reptiles: Eutropis cumingi, Luperosaurus cumingi, Otosaurus cumingii, Ramphotyphlops cumingii, and Varanus cumingi. After his death In 1866, after Cuming's death on August 10, 1865, the Natural History Museum of London purchased 82,992 of his specimens for £6,000. Many important conchological works were based on this collection, including Reeve's Conchologia Iconica (1843-1878, 20 volumes) and the Sowerbys' Thesaurus Conchyliorum (1842-1887, five volumes). Overall, Cuming collected approximately 130,000 herbarium specimens over his life. Botanical specimens collected by Cuming are held by the Moscow University herbarium, the National Herbarium of the Netherlands, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Conservatory and Botanical Garden of the City of Geneva, Harvard University Herbaria, Copenhagen University Botanical Museum, the New York Botanical Garden, the United