Local Museums, 7115 



ceptable. Mr. So-and-So, who wants to show how clever he is at 

 bird-stuflSng, will not understand why you cannot take in his pretty 

 case of humming birds ; Colonel Blazer withdraws his subscription 

 because a place cannot be found for the Oriental arms he captured in 

 Ihe Punjab ; and the lady from India, who offered the pickle bottle 

 containing the snake that nearly killed her baby, is surprised that you 

 have no interest in it. I would rigidly exclude all such " odds and 

 ends," or at all events keep them quite distinct from your local col- 

 lection. There might not be any objection to appropriating a separate 

 room for them if you have one to spare. It should contain all the 

 donations of worsted work and wax flowers, pretty tropical birds, 

 monstrous lambs with two heads and chickens with four legs, Indian 

 arrows, big foreign butterflies, Chinese gods, Egyptian mummies, bits 

 of rock crystal, Indian scalps, sets of South Sea things, models of 

 self-acting machinery and discoveries in perpetual motion, deformed 

 kittens preserved in spirits, mummies of animals that have been 

 starved to death and pretty bottles of coloured sand from the Isle 

 of Wight. 



Another point I would notice is the present state of isolation from 

 each other of the individual museums. It is scarcely to be supposed 

 that each independent committee of management will intuitively light 

 on the best methods of organization. The systems of arrangement in 

 the different museums vary very much, and it is most unlikely that they 

 are all equally good or equally bad. Would it not be possible to 

 organize them on some one uniform system, composed from a careful 

 collation of the several methods now found amongst them ? This could 

 only be attained by organizing a general central committee or director- 

 ship ; and there are doubtless many of our leading men of science 

 who would undertake in their several subjects the task of collating and 

 arranging the methods on which the various departments of the museums 

 should be organized. 



I would not wholly exclude the supervision of the existing committees 

 of management ; they would merely have to resign a part of their right 

 to "local self-government" and work under the general central com- 

 mittee. It should include a President and a separate Commissioner 

 for each branch of Natural History, Geology, Botany, Entomology, 

 Ornithology and General Zoology ; also one for Antiquities, Local 

 Arts and Local Manufactures, and under these the local committees 

 would work on some uniform approved system. 



The "constitution" of this general governing power would be a very 



