It is sometimes said that the faculty of observation is a special gift with limitations, that the naturalist sees bones, feathers, shells because he is looking for them, while the armorer or the engineer but seldom gives a second glance to anything but guns, girders, or machinery. To this rule we find striking exceptions. Edward S. Morse, of Salem, Massachusetts, is the foremost American expert in Japanese pottery. As a youth he was a railroad draughtsman in Portland, Maine, where his ambidexterity with the pencil and his discoveries in natural history brought him to the notice of Louis Agassiz. As a boy he was greatly interested in the shells of his native State; before he left school he had discovered and described a new species of land snail, _Helix asteriscus_, which the older naturalists had regarded as the young state of another and well-known species. At the same time he determined the distinct character of a most minute species, _Helix minutissima_, which had been described as such thirty years before, but which the later authorities had believed to be the young of another species. This faculty for discrimination led him to demonstrate a new bone in the ankle of birds which Huxley, and others, had supposed to be a process and not a separate bone. This discovery added another to the many reptilian characters which have been disclosed in the anatomy of birds. He also established beyond question that the brachiopods, always believed to be mollusks, are not mollusks at all, but are related to the worms. In Mr. Morse’s case we have either a man with a universal power of observation, or enjoying distinct faculties of perception, each usually appearing alone in an observer. Noticing a Japanese shooting a bow and arrow one day he took up the study of the attitude of the hand in pulling the bow. His memoir on this subject, with illustrations, has attracted world-wide interest. Pursuing this theme he examined an ancient object of bronze having three prongs, labeled as a bow-puller in European museums, showing that it had no relation whatever with the bow. Keenly susceptible to the beauty and variety of roofing tiles in Europe and the East, he has for the first time given them classification, and shown their ethnological significance. While teaching natural history at the University of Tokio he brought together the Japanese pottery now exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, unsurpassed as a collection in the world. His eye was as sharp in reading a potter’s mark, however worn and blurred, as when as a boy in Maine he defined minute species of land shells. The Value of Collections.