142 Miscellaneous. 
city and county, and started with the modest annual subscription 
of 5s. each member. It is to the honour of these gentlemen and 
their friends and successors that the Norfolk and Norwich Museum 
continued (supported by voluntary contributions) for nearly seventy 
years, and had, at the time of its transfer to the Corporation, some 
fifteen years ago, in addition to its books and pictures, its antiquities, 
its recent and fossil collections, a fine series of British and foreign 
birds, and the finest collection of raptorial birds in the world, formed 
and presented to the Norfolk and Norwich Museum by the late 
John Henry Gurney, Esq. 
In the Geological Collection are preserved the grand series of 
mammalian remains from the Forest Bed deposits of the Norfolk 
coast, formed by the late Mr. John Gunn, F.G.S., the Chalk and 
Crag collections of the late Mr. Samuel Woodward, besides those 
presented to the Museum in recent years by Mr. James Reeves, the 
present indefatigable curator. 
In 1886 the Norwich Town Council, presided over by their then 
Mayor, Mr. John Gurney, proposed the conversion of the ‘keep’ and 
prison buildings adjoining the Norwich Castle into a series of museum 
galleries, with a view to the transfer of the collections now belonging 
to the Norfolk and Norwich Museum. A committee was formed to 
raise the necessary funds, to which Mr. John Gurney contributed the 
handsome sum of £5000. 
More than £15,000 in addition were raised to complete the buildings, 
which were designed and carried out for the Corporation and the 
Museum Committee in 1887 and following years by Mr. E. Boardman, 
F.R.1.B.A., the city architect. Some years later Mr. James Reeve, 
¥.G.S., the Curator, who had devoted forty-six years of his life to the 
Norfolk and Norwich Museum, undertook and carried out the transfer 
of the entire collections from the old building in St. Andrew’s Street 
to the grand series of eight new spacious galleries and the ‘keep’ of 
the old feudal castle, and has since devoted sixteen years to the no less 
arduous task of arranging for exhibition the vast array of objects of 
art, pictures, antiquities, and relics; also of minerals, geological 
specimens, skeletons and skins of mammals, of birds and their eggs, 
of reptiles, of corals, insects, and mollusca, which now adorn these 
spacious and well-appointed galleries. 
But life is short and art is long—what wonder, then, that Mr. James 
Reeve, who has served the Norfolk and Norwich Museum, and sub- 
sequently the Corporation of Norwich, for an almost unexampled period 
of sixty-two years, should be wishful to retire from his arduous duties 
and obtain some needful repose! Even now his beloved Museum is 
his first consideration, and he writes to the Town Clerk: ‘‘I have 
naturally no desire to entirely relinquish a connexion which has lasted 
for more than half a century.” Whereupon the Castle Museum 
Committee (on January 5, 1910) resolved to place on record its high 
appreciation of the long and eminent services rendered by Mr. James 
Reeve, F.G.S., the Curator of the Castle Museum, etce., and to 
recommend that, in order to retain his valuable knowledge and 
experience, he be appointed Consulting Curator of the Museum, 
and that he be relieved from obligation to attend at the Castle during 
