lly tended storehouse of the records of Nature and antiquity
of the neighbourhood. Too frequently the town museum is made the means
of gratifying the vanity of some local collector, who hands over all
sorts of ill-chosen, badly preserved specimens to its ignorant
guardians, and is advertised by labels on the cases and by votes of
thanks, whilst valuable records placed there in a previous generation
are swept into a corner or broken and cast into the cellar in order to
make space for the new rubbish!

Unless funds are found to place a specially educated man at the head
of a local museum, the museum had better be shut, and such of its
contents, as may be desired, offered to one of the big city museums or
to the National Museum in London. It is no child's play, maintaining
and guarding efficiently a museum which contains "records." It would
be a good thing were a committee of naturalists and antiquaries to
visit the local museums of the United Kingdom and report on the
efficiency of their guardianship and the state of the treasures which
they contain. I know two provincial museums very well in which
extremely valuable records of prehistoric man and of wonderful extinct
animals--found in the neighbourhood and preserved by those who
established the museums fifty years ago--are utterly neglected and
destroyed by loss of the labels and mixing up of the specimens, in
consequence of the death of the persons originally interested in the
museum and of the refusal of the town councils to find money to pay
for the care of the collections. There can be little doubt that in the
present state of local interest in such matters all really important
record specimens should find their way to the British Museum in
London, where, if accepted, their preservation, so far as it is
humanly possible, is assured. That is the distinctive and most
creditable feature of our great State-supported museum. At the same
time it seems obvious that the records of a provincial area can be,
and should be, kept in the county town museum, with a detail and
completeness impossible elsewhere, and that it should be the pride of
the county to be able to show to a stranger full records of the
distinctive features of its natural history and antiquities.

It is clear that whatever failures in this respect may be inevitable
in those hopelessly starved and mismanaged "museums" at present
surviving to bear witness to the decay of public spirit and
intelligent culture i