THE COLLECTIONS IN THE SOCIETY'S MUSEUM. 479 



What I want you to realise now, and to go away and think about, is that there 

 are many ways in which our museum is not what it ought to be, and that it is 

 only by genuine steady work that we can hope to bring it up to the highest 

 standard of utility, so that our collections may be made available to all our 

 members for reference at any time and for readily identifying specimens that 

 are sent to us for that purpose. The Committee, as you know, are anxious to 

 develop that part of our journal devoted to "Miscellaneous Notes": these would 

 in many instances be rendered much more valuable if the name of the particular 

 species, to which they refer, were given. It is therefore to be hoped that mem- 

 bers, when they send us notes, will accompany them with the specimens, or a 

 portion of the specimens sufficient for identification, which can be done by the 

 help of our collections. 



It is quite time, I feel, that I should turn your attention to the avowed pur- 

 pose with which I started this paper, viz., the various collections in the Society's 

 museum. I have already taken up so much of your time with what I intended 

 to be preliminary remarks that I shall have to curtail what I have to say about 

 the collections as much as possible, for you can well understand the impossibility 

 of giving more than a general idea of how well-off we are in certain departments 

 and how deficient in others, in the time at our disposal. 



Commencing with the most highly developed animals — the mammata — we 

 cannot of course attempt to include in our museum a collection of specimens 

 — especially of the larger animals — for our small premises would not pos- 

 sibly hold one-tenth part of the material that would be required : there 

 is the further difficulty of keeping such specimens in any sort of preser- 

 vation in such a climate as this — to say nothing of the staff of assistants that any 

 attempt to do so would entail. We have therefore to content ourselves with the 

 sporting trophies and heads that adorn our walls — and very fine specimens 

 some of them are too — and a small collection of representative skulls. 

 As the larger mammals have always attracted the attention of sports- 

 men and naturalists, there is nothing much left to be learned from a series of fully 

 mounted specimens, so that we do not really lose anything by their absence from 

 our museum. If one looks over the sporting trophies in our museum one 

 cannot help feeling regret that such a limited number of them are even possessed 

 of a label giving the name of the animal, and fewer still have any record of the 

 locality where and the date when they were obtained or the name of the 

 donor. 80 many of our members are rather sportsmen than naturalists that 

 these trophies are of the greatest interest to a large number of them when they 

 come through Bombay ; and as the particulars about them could mostly be 

 gathered from the published lists of contributions in the back numbers of our 

 journal, it would not be impossible to make good the deficiencies that I have 

 pointed out, with a properly drawn up catalogue of what we possess, recording 

 also the horn measurements, at any rate, of the more important specimens. 

 Such an undertaking is more that for a sportsman than a naturalist, and we can 

 surely find some public-spirited member who wdl come forward for such work. 



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