1895. NEWS 'OF UNIVERSITIES, ETC. 149 



Mayer Museums appear to many, I fear, to contain collections with little or 

 no relationship with each other, the one being biological and the other devoted 

 to antiquities, pottery, and other works of art. If the buildings in which these 

 museums are housed were so constructed as to enable the biological collections 

 to be arranged in scientific order — that is in the sequence of the origin and develop- 

 ment — an arrangement which, I trust, may be possible at no very distant date with 

 the intended extension of these buildings — then this ethnological gallery would 

 follow naturally and immediately after that devoted to the history of the anthropoid 

 animals. ... In the anthropological gallery devoted to the history of the 

 highest family of the anthropoids, man, we attempt to display his osteology, 

 embryology, his geographical distribution, and the effects of climate and surround- 

 ings in producing different races — in other words, his biological history. Then in 

 this gallery we follow his intellectual history, tracing its rise and progress through 

 the barbarous or less civilised peoples, following his culture and achievements in 

 the adjoining galleries of the Mayer Museum. The collections in this gallery are 

 arranged geographically, commencing in the near room with the earliest traces of 

 man ; then follows the ethnography of the peoples of Siberia, Greenland, and 

 Labrador, the Esquimaux, and Samoyeds ; then that of the Indians of the American 

 continent from Canada to Patagonia ; in the further room we traverse the Eastern 

 Hemisphere and study the ethnography of the black peoples or Melanesians of 

 Africa, Australia, Papua, New Hebrides, and Fiji ; then of the Polynesians of 

 Samoa, New Zealand, and the Pacific ; next the Mongolians of Malaya, China, and 

 Japan; and finally that of the Indian Peninsula and Burmah." 



This museum has recently acquired the ornithological collection of Canon 

 Tristram. It contains some 30,000 specimens, and is rich in the birds of oceanic 

 islands. 



An important series of Purbeck and other fossils is now being added to the 

 exhibited collection in the Dorset County Museum, Dorchester. The new ac- 

 quisition is the gift of the Trustees of the Corfe Castle Museum, which was closed 

 last year. The fossil fishes from the Dorset Purbecks are especially fine in the 

 County Museum, and several of them were described by the late Sir Philip Egerton 

 in the Decades of the Geological Survey. 



The Museum of the Whitby Literary and Philosophical Society, of which Mr. 

 Newbitt is now curator, has been thoroughly cleaned and re-arranged, and proves 

 very attractive to the numerous visitors who frequent that watering-place during 

 the season. All the local zoological specimens and fossils have been placed in the 

 large central room, and the beautiful collection of moths is already in good order. 

 The case of Arctic specimens obtained by the celebrated William Scoresby, a native 

 of Whitby, is also noteworthy ; and there are some mementoes of Captain Cook, 

 who served his apprenticeship in the town. The museum of the once-famed 

 Scarborough Society appears in a much-neglected state compared with that of its 

 neighbour further north. Some of the larger fossils are falling to pieces, and it is 

 to be hoped that recent changes in management will tend to restore the reputation 

 the institution once held. Our lamented friend. Professor W. C. Williamson, was 

 the last of the small but eminent band of naturaUsts who formed and preserved the 

 collection in the early decades of the century. 



We have received from Dr. E. A. Goeldi numerous pamphlets relative to the 

 Para Museum. One of these, "Practical Instructions for the Collection of 

 Natural Objects," printed in Portuguese, should prove of considerable assistance to 

 South American Naturalists. It contains, among other things, a reproduction of 

 Natterer's plate of Lcpidosiren panidoxa, of which animal many examples have 

 recently been received in England. These instructions are also appearing in Boletim 

 do Museu Paitiense, a new publication of which the second part has just reached us. 

 This part contains a plate of the young and eggs of the famous Opisthocomus ctislatiis. 



