212 NATURAL SCIENCE. September. 



We learn from Nature that at the opening of the Hawkes' Bay (N.Z.) Philoso- 

 phical Institute, the Rev. W. Colenso, F.R.S., President, put before the meeting a 

 scheme for the foundation of a museum to take the place of the present museum 

 at Napier. He offered to give towards the realisation of his scheme the sum of 

 ;^i,ooo and a freehold site, and to supplement this with a second donation of ;^500 

 as soon as ;^5oo was given by someone else. The total amount required to establish 

 the museum is about ;^4,ooo. Referring to the conditions of the gift, Mr. Colenso 

 said : " The museum must be a building which will be open every day of the week 

 and Sunday afternoons too. I find that this is the case in Auckland, where large 

 numbers visit the museum on Sunday afternoons. . . . There is another proviso, 

 and that is, that the building must only be used for the purposes of a museum and 

 library. There must be no concerts, no Liedertafels, no spouting, no mutual 

 admiration societies, no globe-trotters, no tourists, and no parsons. I will not give 



a penny for persons of that kind The museum proposed would be a museum 



for the east coast, not only for Hawkes' Bay proper." 



The principal part of the palaeontological collection of the late Mr. William 

 Pengelly, of Torquay, has been presented by his widow to the British Museum 

 (Natural History) and to the Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street. The 

 fossils were obtained chiefly from the Palaeozoic formations of Devon and Cornwall, 

 but also comprise a series of bones and teeth from the Happaway Cavern, near 

 Torquay. 



Mr. Oldfield Thomas, of the British Museum (Natural History), returned 

 last month from Uruguay and Argentina, whither he had gone to recruit his health. 

 Notwithstanding the wintry weather experienced, he succeeded in bringing back an 

 important small collection of mammals and insects. On August 21, Mr. A. S. 

 Woodward, of the same museum, left for La Plata to examine the collections of 

 fossil Vertebrata from the Pampas and Tertiary formations of Patagonia. South 

 America has proved an attractive field -to the British Museum staff of late, for it 

 will be remembered that Mr. E. E. Austen returned only a short time ago from a 

 collecting expedition up the Amazon. 



The collection of fossil fishes in the British Museum (Natural History) has just 

 been enriched by a fine series of plaster casts and a few original examples of the 

 armour-plates of the gigantic placoderms, Dinichthys, and its allies, from the 

 Devonian formation of Ohio, U.S.A. These specimens were obtained from Dr. 

 William Clark, of Berea, through the intervention of Professor E. W. Claypole, who 

 has described most of the originals, and exhibited a nearly similar collection at the 

 British Association meeting last year at Ipswich. The formidable jaws of 

 Titanichthys and Gigantichthys, two feet in length, are especially striking. 



In the Natural History Reading Room at St. George's Free Library, Bucking- 

 ham Palace Road, an attempt is being made to arrange an elementary series of 

 zoological specimens, simply labelled and described, with a view of preparing the 

 unscientific mind in some degree more to appreciate the exhibits in a public museum. 

 The specimens of mammals, birds, etc., are accompanied by " reading cases," which 

 consist of scrap-books and elementary volumes dealing with groups, these in their 

 turn leading to more advanced text books or reference books for deeper study. The 

 specimens are unduly crowded, but, as the notice card says, this is unavoidable, as the 

 cases are intended for reference only, and to show at one view the principal members 

 of one group. The object of this Natural History Room is to enable those interested 

 to obtain sufiicient knowledge of animals to refer them to their proper relationship, 

 and thus to spread a more definite understanding as to the difference between mam- 

 mals, birds, molluscs, crustaceans, etc. Even in the present day of educational 

 progress, it is astonishing to notice the number of people who persist in calling 

 whales, oysters, and crabs, ^sA, and if the St. George's Free Library can stamp out 

 these absurd errors in their parish they will have done some good. A series of 

 elementary penny hand lists are sold in the museum, as completed. 



