507. 



V. 



Casual Thoughts on Museums. 



Part III.i 



Pal^ontological Museums. 



PALAEONTOLOGY is an ugly word, which there was Httle need 

 to coin. Instead of enhghtening, it has largely mystified. In 

 museums it has created mischief and confusion. As usually under- 

 stood, it means the science of fossil creatures, which many people 

 think are something quite different from living creatures, to be pre- 

 served in a different part of a museum, to be taken care of by a 

 different set of men, and to be investigated by another class of 

 students. Can anything be more preposterous ? 



Once upon a time, when men fancied that words like species 

 and genus (really terms of logic, useful in the arrangement of our 

 knowledge and nothing more) corresponded to actual facts in nature, 

 and that every variation to which some ambitious student chose to 

 give a name was a separate and independent creation, there may 

 have been some excuse for a science of palaeontology, or a museum 

 or a department of palaeontology, as there was for one of astrology 

 or alchemy. Now that we know, or think we know, that living 

 beings are linked to each other by long and continuous chains, 

 perhaps including eventually all living forms and perhaps not, we 

 must believe more or less in the continuity of life, and are nervously 

 anxious to trace its pedigree. We have no patience with those who 

 would separate our fathers and our grandfathers from ourselves 

 because they happen to be dead, and refuse us the privilege of 

 studying together the broken links which unite us to our primaeval 

 relations ; if it be feasible to bring the links together for exhibition 

 or for study, it ought to be done at all hazards. It is, in fact, 

 impossible to separate them without absurdity. Where are we to 

 draw the line ? 



A young American lady, who was looking through the museum 

 at Lincoln the other day, asked my friend Canon Nelson what certain 

 curious-looking stones were. He explained that they were fossils. 

 " And what are fossils? " she asked. " The remains of animals and 

 plants which lived a very long time ago, and are now preserved in 



1 For Parts I. and II., see Natural Science, vol. vii., pp. 97 and 319, August 

 and November, 1895. 



