loo NATURAL SCIENCE. August. 1895. 



pantomime, it is shameful to have passed off for so many years on 

 unsophisticated innocent people these goggle-eyed, discoloured, parch- 

 menty denizens of some necromancer's study, as the Almighty's handi- 

 work. The same with the reptiles. If we are to have a show of 

 British natural history, let it be a real show, and not something 

 which the British fisherman, the British game-keeper, and British 

 country children fail to recognize as old friends and old enemies, and 

 which they are obliged to study in the works of Kircher and his 

 friends. There is something to be said for not showing the public 

 any specimens at all, and reserving them for superior people whose 

 book of Nature is not the one whose leaves are found open in the 

 woods and fields, but in drawers and cabinets reeking with arsenic 

 and camphor ; I believe they call themselves " systematists." But if 

 we do show specimens, let the best artists we can find make up for 

 what is inevitably gone, by in some fashion simulating the look of 

 living things. Why should we not have some of those realistic 

 plaster casts that they have at the National Museum in Washington, 

 some of which were illustrated in Natural Science for August of 

 last year ? They would be an antidote to " the herald's horrors " 

 which are carved in stone all over the Museum walls, and make one 

 wish that a specimen of an architect could be exhibited in the same 

 room with other eccentricities of Nature. 



I should like to prolong this homily in another paper or two. 



Henry H. Howorth. 



