AND THEIR RELATION TO PROVINCIAL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. 257
in exposure, in shelter from wind, in rainfall, and in temperature.
Collections from each district ought to be included in central
museums—i.e., in such localities as would render them most accessi-
ble to residents in all parts of the districts, and would also be most
easy of access to scientific travellers. From such collections, made
in even a single province, much could be learned of the effect on
each animal or plant of the different conditions just enumerated.
Conclusions thus arrived at, based on large series of specimens,
would probably be found to apply to facts of variation and distribu-
tion in wider areas ; and, at least, they would afford working hypo-
theses—most useful of aids' when sufficiently restrained, and not
assumed to be truths without proof.
There are few methods of giving stability to, and furthering the
work of Natural History Societies so efficacious as the establishment
of a thoroughly good museum, in which the one great aim has been to
make perfect collections from the district embraced by each Society. In
the fulfilment of this aim all the members can take part; each can
do something for the object of common solicitude to all; and the
fact of sharing in this common solicitude forms a strong bond among
the members. The field, even in a limited area of country, is prac-
tically unlimited ; for there is no prospect of exhausting the material
requiring to be wrought out, however constant the labour devoted to
it. The collections existing in it are a most valuable assistance to
members studying groups well represented in the museum, and save
much expenditure of useless labour—useless, that is, in merely doing
again what had been done before, but had been forgotten in the
absence of such a record as collections supply. Where any depart-
ment had not been previously studied in the district, this fact would
be at once rendered evident by its absence from the museum; and
the existence of the blank would be a powerful stimulus to members
of the society to try to fill it. It is quite unnecessary to do more
than refer to the great advantage that the use of a well-equipped
museum is to every naturalists' society, in affording the means of
illustrating the papers read before it ; and to the advantage of possess-
ing, in permanent and most valuable form, the results of (frequently)
many years' work on the part of many of its most laborious and
successful members. If there is no public institution of the kind to
which local collections can be presented, they are apt to be allowed
to go to ruin on the death of the worker, and all record of such good
work is entirely lost.