cxii GENERAL SUMMARY OF SCIENTIFIC AND 



Dr. Topinard. Special attention is to be directed to the 

 origin, anthropological characters, language, and geograph- 

 ical distribution of the races, and to any particular customs 

 or beliefs. 



There appears to be a general movement among ethnol- 

 ogists toward a better arrangement of the great mass and 

 variety of material which has been gathered at different 

 times from so many fields. Discarding the thought that a 

 museum should consist merely of bizarre specimens, so ar- 

 ranged as to astonish the laity, they have decided to dispose 

 the objects with regard to education and convenience of re- 

 search. Looking upon humanity as a unit, and assuming 

 that its movement has been, on the whole, onward and up- 

 ward from a state of primal inexperience, they regard an 

 ethnological museum to be a collection of such material as 

 will illustrate all parts of the subject, so arranged as to ex- 

 hibit the various stages in that progress. Wachsmuth and 

 Klemm, of Germany, laid the foundation of this classification ; 

 and the system of arrangement was followed out in the 

 splendid collection of the latter, which has now passed into 

 the possession of the "Leipsic Central Museum of Ethnol- 

 ogy. " 



Discarding the disposition of material adopted by Sir R. 

 Wilde in the Royal Irish Museum, and the arrangement ac- 

 cording to tribes in the Moscow and other museums, they 

 have divided the objects, embracing original matter, casts, 

 drawings, models, photographs, and a library, into anthropo- 

 logical and culture-historical, and these again into prehistoric 

 and historic. The historic objects of culture are embraced 

 in sixteen classes; viz., food, fire, weapons, tools, clothing, or- 

 nament, vessels, dwellings, games, traveling equipments, mu- 

 sic, sacra, fine arts, writing, weighing and valuing, public life 

 and sociological phenomena. 



NOTES ON CLASSIFICATION. 



Dr. Forbes Watson lately read a paper before the " Inter- 

 national Congress of Orientalists," in which the following 

 plan of arranging the "Indian Museum" and "Library of 

 London" was reported: 



