Annual Meeting'.] 
426 
[May 4, 
having been written and tried for a year was subsequently adopted 
by the Council and is published in the report for 1871. It suf- 
fices here to say that all departments of the Society were included, 
and their relations to each other, and the relations of the Society 
to neighboring institutions, were also considered. Our position 
with reference to the Museum of Comparative Zoology was the 
most important and in reality a governing factor in the policy 
advocated and finally adopted. 
Prof. Louis Agassiz was striving, with what was then the most 
potent influence in the United States, to build up a grand national 
museum at Cambridge. It was evidently as useless as it would 
have been wasteful for the Society to adopt a parallel and inevi- 
tably rival course. It was obvious that an attempt to build up a 
museum similar to that at Cambridge would eventually over- 
burden and either ruin the Society as such, or oblige it to dispose 
of its Museum, as had been done by many European societies, to 
the city or some other corporation. Its trust funds required it to 
keep a free public museum, and it was in considering how to do 
this safely and consistently with its past history and the environ- 
ment that the Curator was led to recommend the policy that was 
finally adopted in 1871. We therefore took the only road open 
to us, that of getting up a large educational collection and devot- 
ing ourselves also to the accumulation of a New England collec- 
tion of all the native natural history products. The collections, 
with some notable exceptions, were then in the hands of young 
men some of whom were changed at every annual election and all 
of whom were working without remuneration. Most of the 
older members who had built up the different collections had 
withdrawn from active participation in the work of the Museum 
because of the increasing pressure of professional duties and other 
causes, and some of the collections, that had been got together 
by their care and personal efforts during the earlier years of the 
Society’s existence, consisting of preparations in alcohol and dried 
specimens, had either suffered severely or been wholly destroyed. 
No one could be held personally accountable for these losses. 
They were the inevitable results of a defective system of admin- 
istration, and the blanks thus left had to be filled in with new 
accessions. 
The New England collections which did not exist, except to a 
very slight extent in some departments, had to be made. The 
