lxxxiv PROCEEDINGS-PERTHSHIRE SOCIETY OF NATURAL SCIENCE. 
to say that I know many sad instances, some in towns not far from 
here. Valuable specimens not unfrequently find their way into 
museums thus managed. Their public-spirited owners fondly imagine 
that they will be preserved and made of use to the world if once given 
to such an institution. Their fate is, unfortunately, far otherwise. 
Dirty, neglected, without labels, their identity lost, they are often finally 
devoured by insects or cleared away to make room on the crowded 
shelves for the new donation of some fresh patron of the institution. 
It would be far better that such museums should never be founded. 
They are traps into which precious, sometimes priceless objects fall, 
only to be destroyed; and what is worse still, they bring discredit on 
all similar institutions, and hinder instead of advancing the recog¬ 
nition of the value of museums as agents in the great educational 
movement of the age. A museum is like a living organism—it 
requires continual and tender care. It must grow or it will perish, 
and the labour of maintaining it in a state of vitality is not yet by 
any means fully realised or provided for in our great national establish¬ 
ments or in our smaller local institutions. As Professor Brown 
Goode, the Director of the United States National Museum, in an 
admirable essay on “The Museums of the Future,” says—“One 
thing should be kept prominently in mind by any organisation which 
intends to found and maintain a museum, that the work will never 
be finished, that, when the collections cease to grow, they begin to 
decay. A finished museum is a dead museum, and a dead museum 
is a useless museum.” 
To return to what I said is the first consideration in founding 
a museum—a definite object or purpose to fulfil. What, in such 
a city as Perth, should be the object? That question has, I am 
most happy to find, been already very fully and carefully considered 
by those who have hitherto had the management of the Institution, 
and they have answered it in precisely the way that will be most 
conducive to its value. Instead of a general miscellaneous collection 
of all kinds of “ curiosities,” thrown indiscriminately together, which 
constituted the old-fashioned country museums, you have resolved to 
confine your endeavours to two distinct departments, and two 
only, resolutely refusing to mix these together, or to destroy the value 
of either by introducing into them specimens which, however precious 
or interesting in themselves, would detract from, or interfere with, 
the special lessons to be derived from either of these two series. 
You are most fortunate that, thanks to the energy of your President, 
Mr. Henry Coates, and the munificence of some of your citizens— 
among whom I may mention our excellent friend Sir Robert Pullar, 
—you are in possession of two distinct rooms, admirably adapted for 
their purpose, in which each of these two series can be contained, 
without any clashing with each other. The one is a local collection, 
in which the natural history, the various animals, the wild flowers, 
the fossils, and the minerals of a certain definite area, of which Perth 
is the centre, are so exhibited, arranged, and named that any one can 
identify every creature and plant he may chance to meet with in his 
walks. You had only to fix your boundary, and then the object 
became absolutely definite and limited. Everything not occurring in 
