Hi, Helmut,
 
At 07:21 AM 4/14/98 PDT, you wrote:
>Dear Gary
>
>The label says
>leg. J. Leal, 1993
>so it's clear that J. Leal has collected the shell.
>D. Piferer is the donator.
 
This may be irrelevant to the issue at stake in the thread "leg.
revisited", but it is not clear to me that I have collected the shell,
because I didn't. The original lot was collected by D. Piferer in 1973 ("D.
Piferer col." in the original description, Leal & Moore, 1993, The Nautilus
107(2)). My late friend and professor Don Moore had the material in his lab
for many years before we proceeded to write the description of the new
species. The original lot became the type series; we sent the holotype and
paratypes to six American museums, including the Florida Museum of Natural
History in Gainesville, and to MNHN in France (Paris). I usually refrain
from using the "leg." abbreviation to denote the collector(s) because of
high potential for confusion with the latin "lego, legatus", meaning "sent,
appointed, chosen" (just check any Latin dictionary: this is usually the
primary meaning of the verb). In present day Romance languages the root of
the verb in this latter sense is still alive and kicking. As, for instance,
in the Portuguese and Spanish verb "legar", which means "to give, to
bequeath".  My humble assumption is that some Romance-language workers will
automatically assume this meaning of the verb when for the first time
confronted with the abbreviation "leg.". This is probably the reason for
the "wrong" usage of "leg." in labels from some Italian collections as
previously mentioned by Art Weil.
 
Best to all,
 
 
__________________________________________________________________________
Jose H. Leal, Ph.D.
Director, The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum
Editor-in-Chief, THE NAUTILUS
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