167
EDITORIAL. People who have all the graces Never litter sylvan places, For their graces leave no traces On the ground. BUT what is the use of bothering about litter, when our government strew their—er—volted Pylons athwart the welkin ? Dr. Vinter writes from Castor Hanglands in Northants that he has obtained eggs of the Chequered Skipper butterfly there, though the most outstanding family of those majestic woodlands this year is the Pylonidae whereof fully-developed examples sixty feet in expanse have newly emerged : however, he quite failed to capture a specimen for his cabinet! We much regret that no reference to Pylons figures on the 13 October 1933 agenda at Buxton of the Rural England Preservation Society. O U R ACTIVE
MUSEUMS.
With the model Ipswich and Norwich, budding Lowestoft and Thetford, museums before our eyes, it is indeed good news that at long length the Bury Town Council has awakened to its public duty and is putting M O Y S E S H A L L to rights. Last February a trained curator was borrowed for a couple of months from one of the Cambridge museums, who thoroughly overhauled the mass of recent presentations that had gradually accumulated for years. This had been promiscuously dumped in an empty Upper Chamber of that Hall; much of it was found to be of priceless value, much—stuffed parrots, ethnological specimens, fourlegged chickens, et hoc genus omne—rubbish. The work is not premature : " When I (Dr. Ticehurst in ' Suffolk Birds,' p. 21) first saw the collection of the Rev. J. B. P. Dennis' Birds in 1912, it was in verv fair order considering its sixty years' age [he died in October 1861] ; but in 1927 it was in the last stages of decay, with glass cases broken, resulting in moth and dust." The odium of such culpable neglect of public property lies with the Council, nor does replacement adequatelv represent historic specimens : fortunately none were specific types. This Museum is now brought up to an altogether scientific footing ; and our sole fear is that the clearance may have been too drastic during the absence of the new curator, our Mammals Recorder, Mr. Henry Andrews, who was appointed (in accordance with our Society's suggestion) on 11 July last. Mr. Andrews has been studying the fauna of Egypt, Palestine and Arabia deserta, at first hand since June. During August he was in Jerusalem, after taking an " informal Excursion " of some three hundred miles, as a Bedawy on camels with three perfect Bedawins who had no English, into the N.W. Arabian desert. His return in October, with interesting baggage, was hailed with satisfaction.
168
FDITORIAL.
Our Proceedings tbis year contain a fßll account of tbe official opening of a brand-new Museum at SOUTHWOLD, which our Society has long advocated. Persons interested in the matter wisely enrolled themselves into a local society, especially for the purpose of forming this institution ; a suitable, though we hope too small, building was presented for the purpose ; and nothing is now lacking but adequate exhibition-cases for the display of the numerous local objects already in hand. We have had the pleasure of naming, to the best of our ability, the small and interesting Fossils in this new Museum. These have hitherto been stored in the Town Hall; they were collected, Major Cooper teils us, by the late Dr. Williams of Southwold about 1880 ; and presented to the Borough by his daughter, Miss Williams, about 1910, after the family had left the district. T h e collection falls into ten pretty natural sections:—(1) Mineralogical Rocks, about 100 specimens ; (2) Mollusca from the Oolite at Whitby in Yorks, 45 specimens ; (3) Mollusca from the Upper Eocene strata at Barton in Hants, 174 specimens ; (4) Mollusca from the Coralline Crag of Suffolk ; (5) Mollusca from the Red Crag of Suffolk, wherein Sutton and Foxhall alone are named; (6) Mollusca from the Mammalian Crag of, presumably, Wangford, near Southwold ; (7) Mollusca from the Chillesford Bed that outcrops at Easton Cliff near Southwold ; (8) Sharks' teeth from the above Red Crag ; (9) Fishes' and Mammalian bones from both the above Red and Mammalian Crags ; and (10) Coprolites from the above Red Crag. T h e total specimens amount to about 1500, and these we have augmented to some 2,000 by additions from both the Coralline and Red Crags. Further there are a certain number of Ammonites, probably also from Whitby in Yorkshire. T h e ALDEBURGH Museum has undergone some titivating at the hands of officials of the Ipswich one ; and on 2 July last a public Meeting elected General J. W. S. Sewell, Capt. Basham, M M . Sharp and Patterson with some local ladies, as a committee of management, having Mr. H. F. Jones as hon. secretary. We trust the Contents will soon be improved from the condition in which our Society found them in October last year (Proc. 1932, p. xl). T h e original founders were the late Dudley Hervey, Percy E. Clarke and Dr. Arthur Thomas Winn, M.A., F.S.A. Miss Dale was elected temporary curatrix. It is a thousand pities that the SUDBURY Museum should have been dispersed, for the town lies in an important faunal centre, from both a Suffolk and Essex point of view, bordered by boulderclay topping all the E. Anglian strata down to chalk, and affording good shelter to birds Coming up the Stour estuary (cf. Suff. Arch. Inst. xvi). It was opened at the beginning of 1842, under the presidency of W. D. King esquire, when it contained inter alia 170 ornithological specimens that were all or mainly from
169
EDITORIAL.
Mr. King's collection. Some account of it is given by T . B. Hall in the " Zoologist," vol. i, pp. 341-3. Eventually the entire Museum was distributed by public auction on 4 June 1872; the sale-catalogue enumerates its Contents—in the usual style of such catalogues!—and the birds are said to have gone to a Birmingham nephew of Mr. King. But the majority of the Minerals are, we suppose, those still (Trans, supra, i, p. 70) nicely preserved in the local Institute Hall. Our Member, Mr. Lingwood, has been so good as to look up the comprehensive contemporary account, in the Suffolk Chronicle of 15 July 1872, by W. W. Hodson, " secretary of the Museum Company," which exposes an appalling condition of mismanagement; as well as a letter there, on 22 June that year, regretting the Sudbury Museum's omission to adopt Ewart's Act, " but for which Act the Ipswich Museum would have come to an end within five years of its establishment, a debt at the end of four years nearly crushing it." Can nothing yet be done for ' poor old Sudbury ' in this respect ? BECCLES is beginning to think about a Museum, in a dear old house in Smallgate ; perhaps now, under the mayoralty of our energetic Member, Mr. Roberts . . .
And Newmarket, market . . .
Felixstow, the splendidly central
Stow-
" A ceremonv, unique in the history of English churches, was performed on 27 June 1933 by handing over to the Corporation of Norwich, on lease, the redundant Church of St. Peter in Hungate as a Museum of Ecclesiastical Art, for which purpose it has been renovated by public subscription."—Local Paper. Ecclesiastic Art is the work of men's hands. are works of Nature ! THE
SOCIETY'S COMITAL
How far greater
RECORDS.
The Third Object of our Existence—the publication of permanent Record of the comparative present rarity of Animals and Plants in Suffolk—is steadily being pursued, amid many more generally-interesting subjects. Füll catalogues of the Mammals, Fishes, Echinoderms, etc., have appeared ; the Reptiles will emerge in our next number (we shall be glad to receive, meanwhile, all notices of them); and others are in course of compilation. The most forward group, however, is the Insects which far outnumbers in species the entire remaining Animals. A careful analysis puts the British kinds at exactly 15,790 ; and of these, allowing Suffolk to produce well over two thousand
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EDITORIAL.
Hymenoptera, which is the sole Order still outstanding, our County is found to maintain no less than 8,200 different sorts of Insects. T h u s :— Lepidoptera, M o t h s and Butterflies ( T r a n s , i, p. 3 0 ) : O r t h o p t e r a , Grasshoppers, Earwigs ( T r a n s , i, p. 92) : Coleoptera, Beetles ( T r a n s , i, p. 121) : N e u r o p t e r a , D r a g o n - and Water-flies ( T r a n s , i, p. 181) : D i p t e r a , Fleas and T w o - w i n g e d Flies ( T r a n s , ii, p. 36) : H e m i p t e r a , Bugs and Lice a n d Scales ( T r a n s , ii, p 134) :
Britain 2 0 8 6 ; Suffolk 1356. „ „
38 ; 3580;
„ „
28. 2056.
„
443 ;
„
197.
„
2993 ;
„
1887.
„
1350 ;
„
646.
It is regrettable that Norfolk has made no effort to complete her Insect-fauna : the Lepidoptera have been tended, and their names are now being modernised (in a belated Index to all published volumes, voluntarily compiled at their discretion by two or three of our own Members, and shortly to be issued by the Norf. Nat. Society); a list of Diptera has appeared ; and both Coleoptera and those sections of Hemiptera which treat of Heteroptera, Cicadidae and Psyllidae, carefully worked out. T h e remaining Hemiptera, with all Orthoptera and Neuroptera seem neglected ; and among Hymenoptera the Aculeata, Sawflies and Ichneumons alone have been dealt with at any length. Hence no Insect-total is computable for Norfolk ; Cambs and Essex have attempted no finality of the kind. In fact, few Counties have yet been fully worked in this respect: we recall only Nottingham's 4795 species (Prof. Carr, Invert. Faun. Notts 1916, p. 599) and the Isle of Wight's 3535 species (Morey, Guide to I. Wight 1909, p. 541).
OBSERVATIONS. A Naturalist, hailing from Salisbury (call it Sarum), Took a fine lot of Mac. stellatalisbury At some flowers down in Hampshire (call it Hants), VVhere his confreres' sore wampshire Induced him to graciously shalisbury ! FOREST-BED F O S S I L S . — N o t f o r l o n g h a s t h i s i n t e r e s t i n g S t r a t u m
been so well exposed as was the case on 20 November 1932. In its most northern part on the Corton foreshore, and between 1 \ to \ \ feet below the surface of bluish peat-covered clay, have been recorded the recent Linnean mollusca :—Bithynia tentaculata Limnaea stagnalis, Planorbis corneus, P. spirorhis and Succinea putris with Valvata piscinalis, Müll, a species of Helix or Zonites, and fragments of JJnio or Anodonta sp. (Blake, Geol. M e m . Yarm. and Lowest. 1890). T o these are now to be added the four recent