320 MUSEUMS 



ignorant guardians, and is advertised by labels on the 

 cases and by votes of thanks, whilst valuable records 

 placed there in a previous generation are swept into a 

 corner or broken and cast into the cellar in order to make 

 space for the new rubbish ! 



Unless funds are found to place a specially educated 

 man at the head of a local museum, the museum had 

 better be shut, and such of its contents, as may be desired, 

 offered to one of the big city museums or to the National 

 Museum in London. It is no child's play, maintaining 

 and guarding efficiently a museum which contains 

 " records." It would be a good thing were a committee 

 of naturalists and antiquaries to visit the local museums 

 of the United Kingdom and .report on the efficiency of 

 their guardianship and the state of the treasures which 

 they contain. I know two provincial museums very well 

 in which extremely valuable records of prehistoric man 

 and of wonderful extinct animals — found in the neighbour- 

 hood and preserved by those who established the museums 

 fifty years ago — are utterly neglected and destroyed by 

 loss of the labels and mixing up of the specimens, in con- 

 sequence of the death of the persons originally interested 

 in the museum and of the refusal of the town councils to 

 find money to pay for the care of the collections. There 

 can be little doubt that in the present state of local 

 interest in such matters all really important record speci- 

 mens should find their way to the British Museum in 

 London, where, if accepted, their preservation, so far as it 

 is humanly possible, is assured. That is the distinctive 

 and most creditable feature of our great State-supported 

 museum. At the same time it seems obvious that the 

 records of a provincial area can be, and should be, kept in 

 the county town museum with a detail and completeness 

 impossible elsewhere, and that it should be the pride of 

 the county to be able to show to a stranger full records of 



