Combing The Southern Seas

First Edition. pp. 174 + 24pp Appendix ‘Catalogue of Marine Mollusca of South Australia’ illusts, colour plates, line drws #0218 SCARCE

In the necessary convalescence from his attack of typhoid (of seven or eight months) which included a trip to New Zealand, he revived a boyhood interest in shell-collecting (having early decided that these were less fragile than insects, and unlikely to explode like bird’s eggs). His interests in marine collecting increased, and his eldest brother, William James Verco (1842-1891), a wheat merchant, lent him one of the ketches used for bringing wheat from outlying South Australian ports to Port Adelaide. He learnt the techniques of dredging, and collected shells crabs, sponges and other marine life, for later submission to specialists. In 1902 E.C. Stirling, then Director, South Australian Museum, accompanied Verco on dredging trips, fostering Verco’s association with the Museum. Verco had made his first gift of shells to the Museum in 1898, and later was to make various generous gifts of specimens, books, apparatus and money. The Verco material is considered as one of the outstanding collections of the world (Hale, 1956). On other occasions Verco hired seaworthy vessels and made trips lasting as long as 10-12 days in deeper waters of South Australia, e.g. along the continental shelf of the Great Australian Bight, as well as off Western Australia; he also went on a dredging trip on the (later ill-fated) Commonwealth research fishing vessel Endeavour. From these efforts came a series of papers in the Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, over 1895-1918, and later in the Records of the South Australian Museum (1922-1928), as well as in the Proceedings of the Malacological Society of London (1931), on the molluscan fauna of South Australia. Verco had been appointed Honorary Curator of Mollusca at the South Australian Museum in 1914, and after retirement he spent much of his time working there. Over-all, he described 169 new species or subspecies (as “varieties”) of marine molluscs. In 1926 he donated to the museum his shell collection, as well as his valuable library on conchology, of works in English, French and German. A manuscript was also composed on the details of his trips, later edited by Bernard C. Cotton and published (1935) as ‘Combing the southern seas” (Rigby).”