10 Timehri. 
specimens. Valuable contributions in money and material were also made 
annually out of the Contingency Fund by successive Governors of a scientific 
or literary turn. These have been absent of recent years, but we know on 
the other hand that the Fund has none of its old elasticity and has been 
shorn of its fair proportions. From the new Governor we expect an appre 
ciation of past achievements and a sympathy for present ambitions of 
usefulness which we have missed more deeply and which will prove 
of more service to our work than any assistance from the Fund. Our mer- 
chants and planters, public-spirited citizens of a colony of which they were 
proud, in the old days took a keen interest in the work of the Museum and en- 
deavoured to make it worthy of the best traditions of any scientific or educa- 
tional institution of the kind in any land. The ach‘evements of im Thurn (now 
Sir Everard im Thurn). Appun, Quelch and Evans as Curators responded to the 
demands made by the civic pride of their time and the Georgetown Museum 
assumed very worthy proportions. In those days, moreover, the Society looked 
after the representation of the colony at the various great Exhibitions. 
The Curator and the other officials of the Society under the supervision 
of the Directors, and of the former Correspondence and Imperial Insti- 
tute Committees, performed all the functions of a Permanent Exhibitions 
Committee and for a long period the Society never faltered in its task. 
The independent merchants and planters have gone, through economic 
causes which we must assume to have been inevitable, but the loss 
is ours. The post of Curator has also gone although the Society’s Assist- 
ant Secretary, Mr. J. Rodway, as Honorary Curator, has made a heroic effort 
with resources which until recently were steadily diminishing, to perform 
the duties of what was once a dignified, well-equipped and not underpaid 
office. The salary of the Curator disappeared with the post. The Govern- 
ment grant to the Museum was reduced from $4,500 to $1,500 and finally 
fixed at $2,000. Other losses equally grave accompanied the reduction. The 
rents of the Post Office and Pilot Office were lost by a very summary process. 
The scalpel of economy went down to the vitals. What the cost has been 
to the colony in insect pests who can say ? The days of private contributions 
and of direct personal interest ceased, and an institution which was once the 
leading scientific focus between Washington and Rio de Janeiro, the only 
Museum in the British Possessions on the American Continent, and which 
still has no rival nearer than Para, struggled on in its crippled condition without 
a voice being raised to denounce the shamefulness of this gran rifiuto of the 
colony. One of the first duties of the Society and of our citizens as a whole 
should be the resumption of the enterprise of making the Museum the head- 
quarters for many branches of scientific study and of applied science between 
the United States and Brazil. For anthropological investigation we have 
unrivalled opportunities. All the fauna and flora of South America are at our 
doors. Our entomological collection is vast and of the highest value. The 
study of the timbers of the Continent could be pursued under the most favour- 
able conditions. But we need not catalogue the possibilities which everybody 
connected with the scientific world will at once appreciate in full and which 
must be apparent even to the wayfaring man. 
