REPORT OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING. 
821 
4. —A Committee, with Mr. F. T. Mott, of Leicester, as 
Secretary, to report on the provincial museums of the United 
Kingdom. This report is with a view to “ suggesting means 
bv which such museums can be rendered still more useful to 
i/ 
general science and to popular education,” and possibly to 
obtaining some systematic assistance from the National 
Collections in London. Your Delegate is the member of 
this Committee for the Midland district. 
5. — A Committee for the purpose of making arrange¬ 
ments for assisting the Marine Biological Association’s 
Laboratory at Plymouth. Of this Committee Mr. Percy 
Sladen is Secretary. Assistance, both financial and moral, 
is needed for this institution, which it is hoped will in course 
of time furnish a very valuable adjunct to the ordinary 
appliances for scientific research. 
With one of these committees the Society is connected by 
links of no common order—that on the preservation of native 
plants. This question was first brought before the members 
of the Birmingham Natural History and Microscopical Society 
in 1884 by Mr. A. W. Wills, J.P., and an article on the subject 
written in the “ Midland Naturalist”* for August of that year. 
At the meeting of the Midland Union of Natural History 
Societies at Birmingham in June, 1885, Mr. Wills, in con¬ 
junction with Mr. E. W. Badger, and the writer of this 
report, brought the matter, in the first instance, before the 
Council, and afterwards, with their cordial co-operation, 
before the Conference of Delegates from Societies con¬ 
stituting the Union. The appeal passed by the Conference! I 
brought before the Committee of Section D of the British 
Association at its meeting at Aberdeen last year, and I was 
delegated to lay the matter, in the name of that Com¬ 
mittee, before the Conference of Delegates of Corresponding 
Societies. This I did, and although the Conference is by its 
constitution prohibited from initiating resolutions, the follow¬ 
ing protest met with unanimous support, and is incorporated 
in the Beport of the Conference submitted to the Council 
of the British Association at its recent meeting :—“ We 
view with regret and indignation the more or less complete 
extirpation of many of our rarest or most interesting native 
plants. Becognising that this is a subject in which Local 
Societies of naturalists will take great interest, and can 
exercise especial influence, we urge upon the Delegates of 
Corresponding Societies the importance of extending to 
* Yol. VII., p. 209. 
f Ibid., Vol. VIII., p. 227. 
