74 NATURAL SCIENCE [August 



technical education, and we trust that on this matter the Union 



may be able to enter into cordial relations with the County 

 Councils. 



Government and Provincial Museums 



The meeting of the Museums Association, held this year at Oxford, 

 July G-9, was not largely attended, and did not produce a plentiful 

 crop of papers. Even those that were submitted were not all read, 

 owing to the necessity this Association always feels itself under of 

 curtailing within narrow limits the time devoted to their readin<>- 

 and discussion. 



The chief discussion took place on Prof. Flinders Petrie's sug- 

 gestion of a federal staff for museums ; by which he means that 

 small curators should be abolished, their place being supplied by 

 caretakers, and their work being done by peripatetic specialists. 

 The proposal was thought impracticable ; but there is no doubt that 

 more might be done to encourage co-operation. There are two 

 schemes that suggest themselves as the kind of ideals towards which 

 we might strive. One is that each curator of a small provincial 

 museum should endeavour to become thoroughly competent in some 

 one branch of his work, and that for two or three months in each 

 year he should change places with his fellow-curator from another 

 museum — equally competent, but in another subject. Thus the 

 museum, while paying one curator, would as years passed obtain the 

 experience of a dozen. The alternative plan that occurs to us is 

 that the staffs of the notoriously under-manned government museums 

 should be increased, and that it should be part of the official duty of 

 each specialist-curator to work for two or three months of each year 

 at provincial museums. Government would, of course, have to levy 

 some tribute from the provincial centres, to be applied to the salaries 

 of the government officials; but apart from this there would be a 

 gain to the specialist, to the head museum, and to the country, by 

 the co-ordination, investigation, and effective utilisation of all our 

 obscured scientific and artistic material, as well as by the increased 

 sympathies, knowledge, and experience of the specialist. 



At present government officials seem to hold somewhat aloof 

 from the provincial museums, and from the Museums Association. 

 Whether it be that the hard-worked civil servant can ill spare days 

 from his holiday merely to talk shop, whether he thinks he will 

 learn nothing from these meetings, or whether he really takes no 

 interest in his life-work beyond the drawing of his salary, we do not 

 know. At any rate the Museums Association recognises that it, for 

 its part, has much to learn from the keepers and assistants in our 

 larger museums, and it wishes that government officials could be 



