I. 

 Some Casual Thoughts on Museums. 



Part I. 



NO question has been more debated recently, and none deserves to 

 be ventilated more in your pages, than the best arrangement of 

 our museums, and especially of our great museums like the one in 

 Cromwell Road. The problem, of course, depends upon the purpose 

 and aim of museums. The old-fashioned notion that they form a 

 kind of dustbin, where all the useless, ugly, eccentric, and curious 

 productions of art and Nature are to be shown together and labelled 

 with fantastic information, is obsolete. This kind of museum is now 

 rapidly disappearing everywhere, and a theory (conceded as a theory 

 by everyone) prevails that every object exhibited should teach some- 

 thing in a definite and precise way, and should be arranged with 

 other objects so that a continuous lesson can be conveyed, and should 

 not include a series of epileptic jumps from Cathay to Peru and from 

 a mermaid to a mouse. 



This theory is sound enough as a theory. Its difficulty is in its 

 concrete application. In provincial museums a great many subjects 

 have to be taught with only a limited collection of objects and a 

 limited space. Stratigraphical geology has to be taught as well as 

 the various problems of life, and an object lesson has to be given in 

 the manifold operations of Nature. This involves an entirely different 

 method of arrangement to that convenient in large museums. It 

 can only be carried out by rigidly excluding all kinds of mere 

 " curios," which, having been remitted very often to the stable or the 

 garret, are passed on by some generous patron of science and art to 

 the unfortunate local museum. All this rubbish should be declined 

 or passed on again to where it ceases to be rubbish because it can form 

 part of a series. It should not be difficult to arrange for every local 

 museum a small stratigraphical collection like the one arranged by 

 Mr. Etheridge at the Natural History Museum, only on a smaller 

 scale, with some of the types of fossils ear-marking particular 

 horizons, also a series of typical generic forms from different parts of the 

 animal and vegetable kingdom. This should not attempt too much 

 and not be too large, but every specimen should be as well mounted as 

 possible, so that the fact that these skins really once belonged to 

 living animals should not need a special label to teach us. There 



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