OPENING OF THE NEW MUSEUM. 
273 
Among our birds is the Julian collection, well known to ornitholo- 
gists ; and our antiquities illustrate almost every phase of the pre- 
historic life of the West, and its elder civilisation. 
Many a notable name is inscribed on our donors' roll. North- 
cote, the Academician, is among them, and the unfortunate Benja- 
min Robert Haydon, and Kitto the deaf student, and Roscoe the 
historian, and James Montgomery, the poet, and Maximilian of 
Wied, the German prince scientist, and Hauy, the mineralogist. 
Bowerbank, the geologist, too, is of the number, and General Nelson, 
who first taught the world the true system of growth of coral rocks, 
and Montagu and Rodd, the ornithologists, with Franklin and Parry, 
the Arctic explorers. These, and many others who once dwelt 
among us, but have passed away — Woollcombe, Loudon, Treby, 
Yonge, Coryndon, Soltau, Dunsterville, Budd, Creyke, Pincombe, 
Snow Harris, Wyatt, Johns, Calmady, Spence, Pode, Magrath, 
Tripe, Harvey, Mudge, Hawker, Lampen, Lockyer — have enabled 
our Curators in the past, themselves most liberal of their gifts as 
well as of their time and pains, to form the collections which now 
for the first time in the history of the Society we can adequately 
classify and display. The labours of these other men into which 
we have thus entered carry with them a great and serious responsi- 
bility. 
But a few words must be said about the Museum in its scientific 
aspects. The olden idea of a Museum has died out for ever — the 
idea that gave our Museums no higher character than that of mere 
heterogeneous collections of curiosities. Every article placed in a 
Museum should have its purpose. I assent fully to the opinion 
expressed by my predecessor in 1879, when he said, "The basis 
should be, of course, local, but there should be a thoroughly good 
typical Museum. This would not be necessarily extensive, but it 
should be made as complete as possible, so as to illustrate the more 
restricted fauna and flora, fossil and recent, which would constitute 
the chief part of the Museum, to the perfecting of which the ener- 
gies of those having charge of it would necessarily be directed." 
This, as opposed on the one hand to the mixed medley which so 
often disgraces the Museum name, and on the other to the rigid 
exclusion of everything that is not strictly of a local character, 
seems to me the true theory of a provincial Museum — one which 
should, as far as possible, bring the skilled scientist into direct 
relation with all the native productions of the district, but which 
