E.—7

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with that office." The Board, at a meeting held on the 16th May, agreed upon a memorandum of conditions of the appointment of a Director of the School of Agriculture. Advertisements have been forwarded for insertion in the English and Australian newspapers, and have appeared in the local weekly journals, for a Director to succeed the late Mr. Ivey. Applications are to be sent in by the 31st October. In the meantime Mr. Gray, the lecturer on chemistry, &c, has the charge of the school. The Lincoln College Board of Advice, whose duties and powers were defined at meetings of the Board of Governors held on the 14th May and the 29th June, 1891, entered upon their duties during the current year. The Hon. W. Rolleston was elected Chairman. The Board of Advice has supervised the practical examinations in farm work. On the election of Mr. Henry Overton to be President of the Agricultural and Pastoral Association, he replaced Mr. S. Garforth as a member of the Board of Advice. The two retiring members are the Hon. W. Eolleston and Mr. D. McMillan. They are eligible for re-election, and have signified their willingness to act if elected. The delegates to the Agricultural Conference held in Christchurch accepted an invitation from the Board of Governors to visit Lincoln College. The number of students in residence at the school during the second half of the year 1891 was 38, and during the first half of 1892, 39. The cost of food, fuel, light and attendance during the year for each student and member of the teaching staff has been £37 14s. 3d. per head, as against £38 Is. 5d., the cost of the previous year. During November last, owing to an epidemic of influenza, the usual term examinations had to be postponed, excepting in the case of a few students who desired to bo examined for the final certificate. For the final certificate in December last three students were examined, with the result that Reginald Acton-Adams and Oscar E. Couch obtained above the minimum number of marks, and are consequently eligible for the certificate. Water-races have been introduced on the upper part of the farm during the year. Experiments as to the effect of manures on mangolds and wheat have been carried out, and the results are such as to warrant further investigation in this direction. On the lower part of the farm the creek running thr.ough Block No. 33 has been filled in, and the land drained ; a much needed improvement. The orchard is now being thoroughly dug and the trees are being pruned, and it is proposed when this work is finished to experiment with dressings for the treatment of scale, blight, &c. Further experiments with specimen grains are in progress. Those seeds which proved satisfactory last year are sown this year for further trial. Experiments are to be made with wheat to ascertain the effect of different manures. One field has been set aside for the growth of special grasses. For the purpose of giving students an insight into the buying and selling of stock, arrangements have been made by which students in their fourth term will have an opportunity of attending the Addington saleyards.

2. REPORT OF THE ACTING CURATOR OP THE MUSEUM. According to your instructions, on the resignation of Mr. Forbes, I took temporary charge of the Museum on the 21st May last, and I have, therefore, to submit the annual report of the progress of the Museum since the Ist July, 1891. No changes have been made in the arrangement or mounting of the collections during the year, but since I took charge I have moved the office into the room near the front entrance, in which it was located previous to 1889. Library. —The most important addition during the year has been the purchase of a complete set of " The Transactions of the Zoological Society of London," a work which was much' wanted. Antiquity and Ethnological Booms. —The arrangement in these rooms is partly that adopted by me in 1888, and partly the new arrangement mentioned by Mr. Forbes in his last annual report, which he commenced in 1890 but did not carry out. The re-arrangement of these rooms on some definite plan is urgently required, for at present they present an unnecessarily incongruous mixture. New Zealand Boom. —The skeleton of a cassowary was added by purchase last September, so that wo now have skeletons of all the living genera of struthious birds for comparison with that of the moa. Two valuable additions have been made to the New Zealand collections during the year — namely, moa remains from Enfield, near Oamaru, and a general collection from the Chatham Islands. The moa remains, although not so numerous as those from Glenmark or from Hamilton's, are very interesting, as they have afforded a fine suite of bones belonging to the smaller species Didina and Casuarina. Mr. Sparkes's time has been very largely given during the last six months to preparing these bones for exhibition, and he is now engaged selecting out bones to form a few skeletons, which will be as complete as it is possible to make them. However, it is only the smaller species which are sufficiently numerous to afford materials for building up skeletons, and even with these it will be impossible to make any of them quite complete, for all the small neck vertebra, from the first to about the sixth, are missing. The mode of occurrence of these bones has been described by Mr. Forbes in Nature for last March. The skulls have been submitted to Professor T. J. Parker, who is preparing a paper on them. The rest of the bones have been partly examined by me. I find that there are about 350 adult metatarsi. sufficiently perfect to allow of measurements being taken. These belong to four genera and fourteen different species, all of which have been described. Nearly one-half of them (161) belong to the two small species which I have already mentioned. In this respect the collection differs widely from that obtained at Hamilton's, ill Central Otago, in which Elephantopus was by far the commonest species. The collection brought by Mr. Forbes from the Chatham Islands consists chiefly of fossil bones of birds, but there are also three skulls of whales, and some plants and bird-skins, including two specimens of the Chatham Island pigeon, described last year by Mr. Rothschild in the proceedings