94 THE WOMBAT. 



addition to the great collection in London, there should, if 

 possible, be in each county a collection of the prints of all the 

 subjects that occur in that county. In other words, all the 

 subjects should be printed in duplicate, one copy being in the 

 national, and the other in a local collection. In some cases, 

 no doubt, it would be difficult to find a suitable home or a 

 suitable custodian for the local collection, but as a rule the 

 public reference library or museum of the county town would 

 provide a satisfactory repository. Another difficulty has been 

 that of securing anything like co-ordination of effort. Here 

 and there a strong society has been able to organise and carry 

 out more or less completely a scheme for the survey of its own 

 district or county, but such cases can be counted on the fingers 

 of one hand. Where it has been done the result is, of course, 

 most valuable, but at the same time it is beyond denial that a 

 vast amount of photographing of a kind especially useful for 

 survey purposes has been, and is continually being done by 

 individuals who have a taste for archaeology, or history, or 

 architecture, but who have no opportunity of taking part in 

 any definite scheme, or perhaps of even belonging to a society. 

 A strong central committee of the kind that it is proposed to 

 constitute will make it possible to utilise the results of all this 

 work by bringing them into a national scheme. The central 

 committee will have so important an influence on the general 

 scheme of work that the constitution of the committee, what- 

 ever it may be, will probably meet with some criticism. It is 

 understood that the committee is to be formed of representatives 

 of the chief scientific societies, and though many a worse plan 

 might be proposed, it is not very easy to see in what way 

 chemists and physicists, as such, are specially qualified to deal 

 with a matter that relates mainly to history, archaeology and 

 architecture. Geological photography and meteorological 

 photography have already been taken in hand by committees 

 of the British Association, and consequently the new com- 

 mittee need not concern itself with them, even though a set of 

 the geological photographs might very well be deposited in 

 the British Museum. Such a collection would, however, 

 necessarily go to the natural science branch, rather than to 

 the general museum. It would seem that the essential elements 

 of the committee are archaeologists, architects and historians 

 to decide what is desirable to photograph, and photographers 

 to advise as to the manner in which the work should be carried 

 out. Probably it would be found indispensable to have a sub- 

 committee in each county if rapid progress is to be made. 

 One point of great importance, especially in its bearing on the 

 practicability of anything like a complete survey, is that a very 

 large part of the necessary work has already been clone, and 

 what is needed in the first place is to collect the results, and 

 find out what are the most important things that remain to be 



