1884.] 181 [ Annual Meeting. 



the things themselves, and be as eager to know them by sight as 

 they are now to read descriptions of them in books. It will not 

 take many years of such training as is beginning to be given in 

 some of our public and private schools to bring a multitude of the 

 more intelligent minds to this stage. The progress of the past 

 few years has been slow, but it is substantial and encouraging, and 

 that of the next decade will probably be much more rapid. After 

 that, if the same law holds in education as in the history of other 

 events, we must anticipate a demand for natural history instruc- 

 tion greater than our imaginations would now consider reasonable. 



Mineralogy. 



Prof. W. O. Crosby returned from Europe in October and re- 

 sumed his duties as an assistant in the Museum of the Society. A 

 large proportion of his time has been absorbed in the preparation 

 of a Guide for the mineralogical collection. The difficulties which 

 are to be encountered consist in the mixed purposes of the collec- 

 tion. This is devoted not only to the exhibition of objects, but 

 also aims to make them directly useful to teachers and students 

 as illustrations of natural laws and relations. Thus we can appro- 

 priately use neither a text book, nor an ordinary form of guide, and 

 we have had to learn this fact by actually writing the guide first 

 in the text book form, and thus, by experience, proving that 

 it would not answer. Prof. Crosby, assisted by Miss Carter, dur- 

 ing the past winter, catalogued and mounted all of our New England 

 minerals, but this part of the collections of minerals is still too 

 imperfect to be worthy of a final report. 



Prof. Crosby has given twenty-five specimens of minerals selected 

 from his European collection. 



Geology. 



In the last annual report it was stated that our want of means 

 would probably seriously interfere with, if not prevent, the com- 

 pletion of the rearrangement of this department. These forebod- 

 ings have been unfortunately fully verified, and the collections 

 remain as they were two years since, when apparently advancing 

 rapidly to their last stage of preparation. The materials on hand 



