324 NATURAL SCIENCE. Nov.. 



supposed action of impossible rivers, of glacial nightmares, etc. — let all 

 these be excluded from museums and consigned to geological 

 romances. Let us also exclude those extraordinary diagrams showing 

 the ideally continuous distribution of rocks in which gaps here and 

 gaps there are filled in from other areas. We want the facts, and the 

 facts only, so that the heretic and the orthodox should be on the same 

 level, and so that our museum should not make the architect of the 

 universe responsible for the handiwork of either the most lucid and 

 picturesque of directors of the Geological Survey or the most beaming 

 and popular of heads of Departments of the British Museum for the 

 time being. We want the professor and the museum-keeper to have 

 their little jokes, and we will all laugh at them ; but let it be in their 

 own books and not in our common property, the museums. 



If we turn from the great National Museum of Geology as it ought 

 to be to local geological museums as they might be, a few words may 

 also be said. I, of course, exclude museums of the size and import- 

 ance of the Liverpool Museum, or those at Oxford, Cambridge, or 

 Manchester. A local museum, from the exigencies of opportunity, 

 space, and income, cannot possibly illustrate universal geology, and 

 it is a mistake to welcome into its cabinets all the chips of famous 

 mountains, from Teneriffe to Mount Carmel, which enthusiastic travel- 

 lers stuff into their pockets, and the dislocated bits of spar, rock-salt, 

 and limestone which have come from sporadic visits to stalactitic 

 caverns, to salt-mines, or to the lovely mountains of Styria where I 

 am writing these lines. All this kind of relic is mere rubbish. It is 

 also a mistake to attempt in a local museum more than a small index 

 collection of English strata illustrated by a map and a few sections. 

 The collection ought really to be limited to illuminating the geology 

 of that particular district, and to be illustrated by careful drawings, 

 not necessarily coloured with the geological tints, which one can learn 

 from any small manual, but with the natural colours of the strata, and 

 showing every important section in the neighbourhood where some 

 geological lesson is illustrated — no imaginative pictures, but actual 

 copies of facts as presented by the rocks. Every fault and dislocation 

 should be carefully modelled and coloured and traced. Specimens 

 of the various rocks— not mere chips, but substantial specimens — 

 should be arranged as much as possible in sequence. Above all, 

 when drift deposits occur, the boulders should be collected carefully 

 and labelled, and, whenever ascertained, a specimen of the mother- 

 rock be put near them, and the lines of migration of the travelled 

 stones be marked on a map. It is a disgrace that, so far as I know, 

 there is no adequate and complete collection of boulders in any 

 museum within our four seas illustrating the geology of the drift, not 

 even in the big museums. No wonder we have fantastic postulates 

 introduced into what should be a sober science, and that gigantic 

 ice-sheets filling up great oceans are invented to explain a few boulders 

 occurring near the sea, which have come from the ballast of some 



