507. 



SH 



III. 



The Museums of Public Schools; 



III.— RUGBY. 



FOR the first beginning of a collection of natural history speci- 

 mens in connection with Rugby School, we must go back 50 to 

 60 years. It appears that Dr. Arnold, the great Rugby headmaster, 

 requested the boys of the school to bring back with them specimens 

 of the common stones and fossils of their respective neighbourhoods. 

 The boys answered this appeal with great alacrity, and a large heap 

 of stones was the result. No attempt seems to have been made to 

 label the specimens in any way, until Mr. J. M. (now Archdeacon) 

 Wilson, on joining the staff of masters in 1859, took them in hand 

 and examined them. A great many had been thrown away before 

 that date, but there remained a very large number of specimens, 

 most of them perfectly worthless, but a few score of some interest, 

 and a few really valuable. 



Mr. Wilson with the help of successive generations of pupils 

 collected vigorously in the various brick-fields and lime-stone pits in 

 the neighbourhood, and got together a good representative collection 

 of the fossils of the local Lias. 



A little before 1859 one of the masters, Mr. C. T. Arnold, pre- 

 sented to the school a small collection of fossils, British and foreign, 

 embracing types of the fossils found in the successive geological for- 

 mations ; to these were added a few local fossils, presented, it is 

 believed, by the late Dr. Highton, then a master in the school. 



These collections were, in 1859, all placed in a single case in the 

 Arnold Library, the first School Library, built in memory of Dr. 

 Arnold. To this collection Mr. Wilson added very largely, by 

 collecting in the neighbourhood of Rugby and by gifts of series of 

 specimens obtained elsewhere, including some from the Silurian, 

 Carboniferous Limestone, Chalk, Greensand, Gault, and Eocene, as 

 well as a collection of serpentines and granites from Cornwall. The 

 collection soon outgrew its original case and filled the bookshelves of 

 the adjoining section of the library ; the table-case being then, and 

 ever since, devoted to the strictly local collection. 



1 Previous museums dealt with in this series were : Charterhouse, vol. iii., p. 40, 

 July, 1893 ; and Eton College, vol. vi., p. 201, March, 1894. 



