ii6 NATURAL SCIENCE. Feb.. 



since such rarities as the Mauritius starhng and the Labrador duck 

 were exposed to the danger of ruthless destruction, while elsewhere 

 in some of our great provincial museums, and in some of the great 

 Continental ones too, such as Leyden and Paris, everything seems to 

 be stuffed, and every animal, however rare and precious, is exposed 

 to dust and sunlight and other causes of ruin and decay. It is really 

 shameful, for in these matters we are trustees for those who come 

 after, and if we are destroying the wild creatures wholesale, we ought 

 at least to let our children see what they looked like. 



These are not the only things that ought to be put by in lavender ; 

 everything that requires a special label to show that it is part of a 

 fossil at all should be removed at once into the students' cabinets. 

 The palaeontological galleries at Kensington, which have been 

 arranged with great skill and intelligence by Dr. Woodward, suffer 

 greatly from this cause. They are literally crowded with broken and 

 imperfect specimens, whose proper place is the students' room, where 

 they are more accessible to the specialist and less distracting to the 

 passer-by. 



In the next place, it is a great mistake to exhibit too much. Do 

 as we will, we cannot exhibit every species, we must make a selection ; 

 it is better, therefore, to exhibit a moderate number of properly 

 mounted and labelled specimens, each of which teaches something, 

 than to stuff the cases full of objects two or three deep, which nobody 

 can see properly. Here again, referring to Dr. Woodward's galleries, 

 I am bound to say that the ordinary philistine is quite bewildered by 

 the immense number of duplicates exhibited. It is simply appalling 

 to think of the herd of mammoths represented by some bone or tooth 

 in the gallery of mammalia. It ought surely to be sufficient to 

 exhibit as perfect a skeleton of the beast as we can get, as good a 

 series as we can make to show his dentition at different ages, sections 

 of the teeth to show their structure, and perhaps one series of 

 disarticulated bones. It is merely a ridiculous mistake to exhibit 

 vast rows of duplicates of the same thing, instead of remitting them 

 to the study series. Geographical distribution should be taught by 

 maps, not by reduplicated specimens, while a scale of strata can 

 indicate geological distribution when necessary. 



I hope these references will not be interpreted as meaning that I 

 am not deeply sensible of, and deeply grateful for, what has been done 

 for us all in this department of the museum by Dr. Woodward and 

 his merry and aggressive boys since the removal of the collections 

 from Bloomsbury. There is nothing like these fossil collections any- 

 where, either in their actual wealth, or in the way in which they are 

 exhibited. Having said this, I cannot honestly, before passing on, 

 avoid contrasting their work with that I have lately seen in another 

 museum, namely, the Museum of the University of Oxford, where 

 young men at an impressionable age are supposed to be inspired with 

 the love of natural science, and a distaste for drinking and dissipation, 



