CXXV1 ANNIVERSARY MEETING. 
imposed or devised them are retiring or have already retired, and 
there is no provision whatever as yet made-.for the duration of their 
work. 
The Committee are sorry to observe in all the collections, that the 
law laid down in the early days of the Society, and frequently re- 
peated, that every specimen should be distinguished by number, has 
not been rigorously adhered to. Much valuable time has been ex- 
pended by different secretaries and curators in affixing to the speci- 
mens numbers which while they lasted were fertile sources of infor- 
mation, but which, for want of care or perseverance, have now become 
nearly worthless. It is very desirable that in future the admonitions 
of the Council on this subject should be strictly enforced. Without 
these distinctive numbers the Council has no means of knowing the 
actual extent of the collections, nor their rate of increase, nor can a 
general catalogue be drawn out without this important preliminary. 
Although it is enacted by a resolution of Council in 1810, that 
the whole collection should be under the management of the Presi- 
dent and Secretaries, your Committee apprehend that it ever has 
been and still is the undoubted right and duty of the Council to 
determine at least the principle upon which the several departments 
of the Museum shall be conducted. 
To put a large collection in order, and still more to keep it in order 
(where there is continual ingress and egress of the objects to be 
arranged), there must be unity of design and a steady adhesion to 
established rules. Where no such rules exist, the most punctilious 
cannot obey them ; and if no such obedience is required, it is only 
natural that every new officer appointed, though he may not find 
fault with what has been done before, will yet endeavour to amend 
it. Hence each new appointment is apt to involve a change of 
system ; which, whether better or worse than its predecessor, must 
in either case occasion a halt. On every reversal of the engme the 
movement which should be progressive becomes retrograde, and it 
becomes doubtful, when once the arrear of business is allowed to accu- 
mulate, at what period, if ever, the ground lost can be recovered. It 
has at all times been a great object of the Society to have the collec- 
tions properly catalogued; the labour expended upon it at one time 
or another is prodigious; but instead of perfecting the catalogues he 
found, it has been the ambition of each succeeding officer in charge 
of the Museum to construct a new catalogue of his own. 
Attempts have been made agai and again to form a Catalogue of 
the British Collection, but they have all been thwarted; in some 
degree, no doubt, by the continual fluctuations to which it has always 
been subject, but still more by a want of perseverance on the part of 
those who began the task, and a love of originality on the part of 
those whose duty it has been to complete it. It were hopeless to 
expect that such a catalogue will ever be constructed unless upon 
a well-considered plan, distinctly laid down by the Council in the 
first instance, and then rigidly maintamed and steadfastly followed 
out. 
The plan of a catalogue should be regulated in some measure by 
