Notes and Comments. 35 
Selby is indebted to its son, Dr. Jonathan Hutchinson, for it. 
We presume therefore we may take this as a type of an 
educational museum. We were sorry to see from a report 
of an address, recently delivered at Selby by Dr. Hutchinson, 
that this museum is not appreciated as it ought to be. We are 
gratetul to Dr. Hutchinson for what he has done for Selby, and 
should certainly be the last to in any way deprecate the good 
work he has accomplished there. But might not the museum 
be more interesting and more educationally valuable, if it were 
strengthened in its local collections? We are not quite sure 
whether the curator in this educational museum is like a pugilist 
who is not in shackles, or like a bird which is not wing-maimed, 
or whether the Selby institution ‘attains the dignity of a curator’ 
at all. But we feel sure that the Selby Museum would be more 
valuable, educationally, if within its walls we could see a repre- 
sentative collection of the antiquities, plants, shells, birds, 
insects, etc., of the interesting district in which the museum is 
situated. It is all very well for a museum in a small town to be 
‘frankly fragmentary—here a little and there a little’ as the 
Museum Gazette prides itself in being, but as to the best kind 
of a museum, educationally, in a small town, there are more 
opinions than one. We hold a brief for the /oca/ museum, 
and whilst no museum can or should ever be ‘ complete,’ a local 
museum can surely be more so than a general museum. 
LIASSIC DENTALIIDZE. 
In a recent issue of the ‘ Quarterly Journal of the Geological 
Society,’ Mr. Lindsall Richardson has an important paper on 
Dentalium giganteum, Phillips. (Natural Size). 
the above subject, in which the various Liassic species of Den- 
talium are figured and described. Particular reference is made 
to Dentalium giganteum, Phillips, myriads of which ‘may be 
seen covering the upper surfaces of some of the sandstones 
¥907 February 1. 
