4 Director' s Annual Report. 



are to be preserved and not to be sacrificed to the curiosity of idle 

 speculators who, in this country at least, make use of the Museum 

 simply as a means of passing the time. 



At present our bird colle(5lion numbers many thousand skins, 

 but only a few hundred will be mounted and exhibited ; the bulk 

 of such colledlion is for study and can be best used in the condi- 

 tion of unmounted skins, and can best be preserved in boxes or 

 trays. An ideal museum should have room for storage largely in 

 excess of exhibition space, and should have ample provision 

 for workrooms. Neither of these requirements do we possess 

 at present. 



As a single illustration of this let me refer to the photograph 

 room, which is several hundred feet away from the main building, 

 conne(fted by a coral road whose dazzling whiteness is blinding to 

 the eyes in fair weather. As there is no other suitable room this 

 is used for the storage of book-paper, old furniture, corals, plaster 

 casts and moulds, barrels of fish and man}' other things. It is 

 used to unpack colledlions and to make large staff models of vol- 

 canoes or groups of birds, and lastly to fumigate or disinfect 

 .specimens with carbon disulphide. All of these uses are antago- 

 nistic to the photographic work for which it was built. It becomes 

 difiicult to use the room for its legitimate purpose, and yet on this 

 use the illustration of our publications largely depends. 



Without multiplying illustrations which could be drawn from 



nearly every department, we come to the greatest need of this 



Museum, — a wing devoted to the scientific work of the Museum. 



The Direcftor long since formed plans for such a building, which 



should accommodate on the ground floor the printing work of the 



Museum, which is continuous and needs more room than it has at 



present, the paper stock and illustration blocks ; on the first and 



second floors the various storage and workrooms, and in the attic 



the photograph gallery with a northern skylight. To such a 



building the public would have no access, but scientific men could 



[196] 



