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 6-9, 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 reading 
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 
