1895. SOME CASUAL THOUGHTS ON MUSEUMS. 323 



In the same way we must, no doubt, in order to understand the 

 sequence and history of many rocks (notably the crystalUne and 

 metamorphic rocks), know something of mineralogy and of chemistry ; 

 but this does not mean that in our geological museum we are to 

 confuse the natural history of specific minerals with the history of 

 successive strata. Petrology is, of course, very much more germane 

 to geology than is mineralogy — a truth which has only recently begun 

 to be realised in our collections, and it seems to me to be as real a 

 mistake to pile up a large series of mineralogical specimens in a purely 

 geological museum as it is to do the same with palaeontological 

 specimens. The mineralogical specimens should be kept apart 

 altogether. Having discarded what seem to myself to be discordant 

 elements from a geological musevim as now understood, we should 

 then have left a geological museum devoted essentially to illustrating 

 the problems of true geology. It should contain plenty of models or 

 specimens on a large scale, showing joints, faults, flexures, synclinal 

 and anticlinal curves; the junction of different rocks, illustrating 

 conformity and nonconformity, continuous sections from different 

 areas, either built up of the rocks themselves or with the cores of 

 borings, with good and well-named typical fossils from each horizon 

 in adjoining table-cases, and there should, where possible, be actual 

 specimens and not drawings or plans. We should, in addition, have 

 abundant models showing the actual work of living glaciers as 

 distinguished from the nightmares which in recent years have 

 pursued so many romantic writers, who despise experiment and an 

 appeal to facts, as every poet should. There should also be models 

 and examples from the laboratory of the actual results of melting 

 rocks under various pressures and conditions, of the effects of 

 shearing, of dynamical and chemical metamorphosis, of the cavities 

 and cracks caused by earthquakes, of the various mechanical pro- 

 cesses of Nature such as we actually find her employmg, and in 

 addition different series to illustrate the stratification of different 

 parts of the world, arranged in narrow parallel galleries on similar 

 lines to the admirable gallery arranged in the museum in Cromwell 

 Road by Mr. Etheridge, only that the styatigvaphy of each should he kept 

 distinctly separate, and there should be no attempts made to fill up gaps in 

 one area by inserting evidence from another. Museums should illustrate 

 facts as much as possible and hypotheses as little as may be. We do 

 not want hypothetical sections and wonderful examples of the ingenuity 

 of cloud-building professors as to the origin of certain phenomena. 

 Let these be remitted to the professors' books, the best of which are 

 necessarily ephemeral publications — alas, that it should be so with so 

 much amusing literature ! What we want in museums is not poetry, 

 but prose ; we want the actual facts of nature represented, and not 

 the workings of some geological dramatist trying his hand at remaking 

 the universe. Those hideous diagrams of supposed internal arrange- 

 ments of volcanoes, of supposed denudations on a wide scale, of the 



