are swept into a corner or broken and cast into the cellar in order to make space for the new rubbish! Unless funds are found to place a specially educated man at the head of a local museum, the museum had better be shut, and such of its contents, as may be desired, offered to one of the big city museums or to the National Museum in London. It is no child's play, maintaining and guarding efficiently a museum which contains "records." It would be a good thing were a committee of naturalists and antiquaries to visit the local museums of the United Kingdom and report on the efficiency of their guardianship and the state of the treasures which they contain. I know two provincial museums very well in which extremely valuable records of prehistoric man and of wonderful extinct animals--found in the neighbourhood and preserved by those who established the museums fifty years ago--are utterly neglected and destroyed by loss of the labels and mixing up of the specimens, in consequence of the death of the persons originally interested in the museum and of the refusal of the town councils to find money to pay for the care of the collections. There can be little doubt that in the present state of local interest in such matters all really important record specimens should find their way to the British Museum in London, where, if accepted, their preservation, so far as it is humanly possible, is assured. That is the distinctive and most creditable feature of our great State-supported museum. At the same time it seems obvious that the records of a provincial area can be, and should be, kept in the county town museum, with a detail and completeness impossible elsewhere, and that it should be the pride of the county to be able to show to a stranger full records of the distinctive features of its natural history and antiquities.