Ross Mayhew asked, repeatedly, why there were so few early taxonomists of
mollusks.

I don't have the full answer, but until one of Conch-L's malacohistorians
reads their digest version, I'll answer part of it.

Linnaeus was a botanist first and a zoologist second. He described many
genera and species of invertebrates, but his classification of them was
confused, and many of them were jumbled together in a garbage-can category,
Vermes ("worms"). Linnaeus didn't show a strong interest in seashells,
although S. J. Gould unearthed a remarkably obtuse paper by him drawing
analogies between bivalve and human female anatomy (no, I am NOT making this
up) that might have slowed the progress of malacology all by itself.

Anyway, confusion continued generally for some time, and people were
uncertain what characteristics of the shells were diagnostic (i.e., reliably
separated species). I think it was Lamarck who offered the first
classification of invertebrates that really made sense and had predictive
power. Even so, brachiopods were mixed in with mollusks, foraminifera were
thought to be larval cephalopods, etc., for a long time afterward.

That's probably just part of a bigger picture, and I look forward to hearing
more about it from one of the Conch-L "generals". I suspect that some early
biologists were overwhelmed by the great diversity and variability of
mollusks, and didn't want to get bogged down in them when they could study
other beasties. Also, what would be the point? Plants were useful as food,
medicine, and raw materials when shells were mostly just pretty objects for
the shelf, and pretty objects of uncertain provenance at that. Linnaeus sent
several of his students out to the wilds of North America, Japan, etc. to
discover and classify plants by the new system. It took awhile longer before
anyone made expeditions for mollusks.

In other news...

Art: Croneis proposed a military classification for fragmentary fossils back
in the 40's, but no one used that one either.

Scott: Your wife sounds unusually understanding for a non-collector.

Helmut: You are an Advanced Collector, and often a Preemptive Collector.

Carol: Only an AMATEUR hobbyist? What would a professional hobbyist be like?
Oh, wait, I think Scott described that already...

Andrew K. Rindsberg
Geological Survey of Alabama