lxii report — 1879. 



(No. 2.) 



Treasury Chambers, 



July 22, 1879. 



To the President and General Secretaries of the British Association for the 

 Advancement of Science, 22 Albemarle Street, W. 



Gentlemen, — 1 am directed by the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's 

 Treasury to inform you that the First Lord of the Treasury has submitted to this 

 Board the letter of 25th March last, wherein, on behalf of the Council of the 

 British Association for the Advancement of Science, you call his Lordship's atten- 

 tion to certain recommendations made in the Fourth Report of the Koyal Com- 

 mission on Scientific Instruction, which was presented to Parliament in 1874, 

 relative to the Natural History Department of the British Museum ; and wherein, 

 further, you refer to the British Museum Act, 1878, as ignoring the said 

 recommendations, and go on to urge that the occasion of proposing to Parliament 

 a vote towards the expense of the removal of the same collections from their 

 present situation to South Kensington should be taken for effecting the alterations 

 in the mode of administering them recommended by the Royal Commission. 



My Lords have, in the first place, to point out that the British Museum Act, 

 1878, nowise prejudges the question which you raise as to changes in the adminis- 

 tration of the collections, but is confined to authorising the removal of them to the 

 new Museum. 



In the next place, it is to be remembered that the recommendations to which 

 you advert require further legislation, and that the vote in supply, of which a part 

 only is necessaiy to be taken this session, for completing the new Museum is 

 equally required whether the collections are to remain under the management of 

 the Trustees of the British Museum or are to be assigned to some other authority, 

 and therefore that this vote, like the Act of 1878, in no degree pledged either 

 Parliament or Her Majesty's Government upon the question of the best way to 

 administer these collections in the future. 



A third point of some importance is that both the Royal Commission and the 

 Council which you represent propose to continue in office the present Superintendent 

 of the collections. 



Under these circumstances, my Lords, while fully agreeing with you that the 

 question of the administration of these collections is one of the utmost importance 

 as regards the future progress of Natural History, in this country, are also of 

 opinion that there is nothing which, on a point requiring so much consideration, 

 calls for instant decision. 



They think that the reasons which led them in 1877 to constitute the present 

 Meteorological Council, rather than to create a new Government department, are 

 not without weight in regard to displacing the Trustees of the British Museum. 



The Chairman of the Royal Commission on Scientific Instruction is himself a 

 member of the sub-committee of the Trustees of the British Museum for the 

 management of these collections. The same sub-committee contains other names 

 of high rank and of scientific eminence ; nor have my Lords any reason to think 

 that the standing committee of the Trustees, nor the Trustees generally, of the 

 British Museum are insensible to the importance of having modern science strongly 

 represented on the sub-committee of Natural History. 



The general question whether public aid to science should, in a case like the 

 present, not be allowed to be administered by a body with a certain real indepen- 

 dence of its own is a very wide and a very important one ; nor is the present the 

 only case which raises it. 



My Lords do not intend to propose to Parliament any immediate change in the 

 management of these collections, and they would be glad to find that the reasons 



