34 Notes and Comments. 
villages or small towns ought to restrict themselves to local 
objects. By all means have in such museums the best collec- 
tion possible in illustration of what can be got in the district, 
but let it be a department, not the whole affair. What are 
called local museums are difficult to make anything like com- 
plete, and the endeavour to make them so may stimulate some 
of the worst vices of the mere collector. However successful, 
they remain meagre and unattractive. For educational purposes 
they cannot approach one of general scope. The curators of 
such museums are like a [szc.] wing-maimed bird, or a [sic.] 
pugilist in shackles. As a rule, we fear that merely local 
museums rarely attain the dignity of a curator, but languish 
for a few years under an honorary secretary, who once was 
zealous, and finally hand over to some more liberally constituted 
institution the remains of the Herbarium, and a few stuffed 
birds. It is better to do things well whilst we are about them.’ 
AND LOCAL MUSEUMS. 
Just so! The last sentence quoted is just the point. But is 
it possible ‘to do things well’ in a village or small town, in 
any other way than by making the collection strictly local ? 
Nothing is so conducive to making such museums ‘ receptacles 
for rubbish’ (respecting which we have heard so much of late), 
and of little value educationally, or in any other way; and a 
curator of a small local museum had far better be like a ‘ pugilist 
in shackles’ than a pugilist let loose, in which latter case the 
harm he might do might be serious! To some extent it depends 
on what the A/useums Gazette calls ‘a village or small town,’ 
but in the north we should put Chesters (Northumberland) and 
Pickering and Driffield in Yorkshire under that head. In each 
of these places (and others might be cited) is a local museum 
of very great value—historically, educationally, and in other 
ways too. We might mention larger places, such as Perth, 
York, and Chester, where there are strictly local museums of 
the greatest value and importance, museums which are well 
known in the north at any rate, if not at Hazelmere, and each 
of these museums is particularly valuable because of the local 
character of its exhibits, and each also ‘attains the dignity of a 
curator’! 
THE SELBY MUSEUM. 
We have in Yorkshire, at Selby, an ‘educational museum’ 
well known to the editor of the A/useum Gazette, seeing that 
Naturalist, 
