"It is perhaps a more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be born a millionaire." -- Robert Louis Stevenson Then again, it may be the most fortunate destiny of all to be a shell-collecting millionaire, like Truman H. Aldrich. Aldrich, a relative of the New York Rockefellers, early acquired a taste for collecting freshwater shells. He moved to Alabama after the Civil War to start a bank, and later opened a coalfield and made quite a lot of money. State Geologist Eugene Allen Smith persuaded him to take up the study of Tertiary mollusks, which were sorely in need of attention. Aldrich must have spent many happy evenings sorting shells; there was no television then. He not only visited outcrops, but paid others (including Daniel Webster Langdon) to collect for him, and built up one of the world's largest collections of modern shells by trading and buying. While also representing Alabama in Congress, one of the few paleontologists ever to grace those hallowed and incorruptible halls. Through what his eulogist called a "quixotic sense of honor", Aldrich lost his fortune, but continued his work at the Alabama Museum of Natural History as curator of paleontology until his death. If a man's inner life can be read in his face, then photos show that he was content. While he was still very much alive and active, Aldrich donated some of his shells and shell books to the Johns Hopkins University and some to the Geological Survey of Alabama/Alabama Museum of Natural History. The modern shells are now at the Florida Museum of Natural History, and the Johns Hopkins shells are now at the Smithsonian, but his name is still on all the labels and bookplates, and it is honored. I suppose that money allowed Aldrich the leisure time to do as he pleased with his shells, and to amass a really large collection of them, not to mention books, which have always been expensive. But I've read D. W. Langdon's field notes, and they impart a sense of wonder and discovery that Aldrich could have experienced only through the microscope. Langdon was sent to canoe down the Chattahoochee River and discovered a major Miocene site, Alum Bluff, just south of the Florida border. Langdon liked to sing as he worked. He must have sung that day. Andrew K. Rindsberg Geological Survey of Alabama