26o NATURAL SCIENCE. Oct.. 



Lankester is reorganising the zoological collections in the Oxford 

 University Museum. Yet an assemblage of specimens designed to 

 illustrate only those characters at present employed for purposes of 

 classification would, while assisting the tyro-systematist in the 

 identification of genera and species, fail to suggest in what directions 

 the sphere of taxonomic observation might be extended. Systematic 

 zoology and botany are very largely mechanical, and are based on the 

 combinations of a limited number of characters which are found to 

 differ sufficiently for the purpose in the various families, genera, and 

 species. The ultimate aim of the zoologist and botanist, however, is, 

 or should be, not the description of so many new species in a lifetime, 

 but the grouping of animals and plants according to their natural 

 affinities, and for this purpose a wider knowledge of morphology is 

 necessary. Limitation of the number of diagnostic characters is fatal 

 to the advancement of systematic work. There are, it is true, many 

 organs — the viscera of animals, for instance — which will probably 

 never be made use of for the identification of species, because type- 

 specimens are usually disembowelled before finding their way to a 

 museum ; but, at the same time, no systematist would be justified in 

 issuing a new system of classification while ignoring the evidence of 

 natural afiinity to be afforded by internal organs. With regard to the 

 former objection, there are surely very few who would maintain that 

 the student derives no more benefit from the examination of a 

 collection of anatomical preparations than he would from a text- 

 book, however well illustrated. A figure, whether woodcut or coloured 

 plate, always falls far short of the original by the loss of the third 

 dimension of space : the examination of a prepared dissection is 

 in educational value second only to the dissection of the parts by the 

 student himself. 



In such an educational collection, not only do the several classes 

 of animals call for different methods of treatment, but the amount of 

 space to be allotted to any one system of organs varies very 

 considerably in the different classes. Thus, while a whole table-case 

 is occupied by preparations of mammalian teeth, a few square 

 inches suffice for the same organs in birds, and whereas the exo- 

 skeleton of Amphibia is efficiently represented in an area of less than 

 two square feet, the corresponding system in Mollusca, constituting as 

 it does the basis of that special branch of science, conchology, calls 

 for an inordinate amount of space. In the case of Amphibia, no one 

 system of organs requires an exceptional amount of space for its due 

 exposition, and the recently completed series of osteological and 

 anatomical preparations illustrating the morphology of the Amphibia 

 may therefore be regarded as typical and representative of the whole 

 Index Collection. 



This series is contained in a wall-case in the fourth bay on the 

 west side of the entrance hall. The preparations are fixed to a board 

 or facia, three feet high and seven feet wide, placed vertically so as to 



