8 In his historical sketch of the Society, Bouvé (1880) reported that the Bailey Collection consisted of 1,839 slides, a figure almost identical to that in the 1877 Annual Report. The Society's Annual Report of 1892 contained a description of the "present condition" of the Bailey Collection: 24 boxes of "about 874 slides, in fairly good condition," about 568 slides in odd boxes and parcels plus an additional 27 slides labelled by Durkee (Proc. Boston Soc. nat. Hist. 25:438-439. 1892.). The parcels were described as "loose bundles, [containing] 160 native and 71 foreign diatom-slides." This description indicates there were 1,469 slides in the collection. During the late 1850's and 1860's, the Proceedings of the Society alludes occasionally to the collection being less well organized than it might be and to its being heavily used and borrowed from, especially shortly after its receipt by the Society. H.L. Smith (1872) reported in The Lens concerning the Bailey Collection that ...the slides of Diatomaceae, and more especially the crude materials left by him [Bailey], have not been so fortunate in escaping the grasp of greedy collectors. Perhaps I am mistaken, but either the collection of Prof. Bailey, which he gave the Society, was much more meagre than that I had seen at his own rooms at West Point, or it has suffered since its deposit. DeToni (1891) notes also, possibly based on Smith's earlier remarks, that the Society's Collection "Devrait contenir tous les types de J.W. Bailey, mais la plupart ont été volé." A summary of the estimates of the extent of the Bailey Collection involving diatoms is presented in Table 2. No records other than those described above have been found useful in determining the extent of the