ESSAYS 681 



to catch at least one specimen of every kind which shall be pinned and preserved 

 in perpetuity for as long as one stone shall stand upon another in the kingdom of 

 man. There are already an enormous number of such types, as they are profes- 

 sionally called, not only of insects, but of all classes of animals and plants jealously 

 guarded and conserved by the zealous officials of the British Museum. 



When I was a small boy I greedily saved up the names of naval vessels, and 

 inscribed each with a fair round hand in a MS. book specially kept for the purpose. 

 Now the financial or aesthetic motives that may be said to govern the boy 

 collector of postage stamps, birds' eggs, cigarette cards, must here be ruled out of 

 court. For if half-a-dozen of the rarest unused surcharged Mauritius, a complete 

 set of Wills's "Cathedrals" or Player's "Inventions," or a single blood alley of 

 acknowledged virtue minister to the tingling acquisitiveness of the average school- 

 boy, it is difficult to say the same of the hunting down in newspapers and books of 

 battleships, cruisers, and T.B.D.'s. At least I am inclined to think that my sub- 

 conscious motive was a fear lest any of His Majesty's ships should be overlooked 

 or lost, that it was indeed a good example of the instinct for simple conservation 

 uncomplicated by the usual motives of the collector. 



The joy of possession, the greed, vanity and self-aggrandisement of the collector 

 proper, are deftly subverted to the use of the explorer and conservator of know- 

 ledge who, having a weak proprietorial sense— bloodless, anaemic, it must seem to 

 the enthusiastic connoisseur — is satisfied so long as somewhere by some one Things 

 are securely saved. The purpose of the arch-conservator — his whole design and 

 the rationale of his art — is to redeem, embalm, dry, cure, salt, pickle, pot every 

 animal, vegetable, and mineral, every stage in the history of the universe from 

 nebular gas or planetismals down to the latest and most insignificant event 

 reported in the newspapers. He would like to treat the globe as the experimental 

 embryologist treats an egg — to preserve it whole in every hour of its development, 

 then section it with a microtome. 



People who are not in the habit of visiting or considering museums fail to 

 realise how prodigiously within recent times the zeal for conservation — or, as Sir 

 Thomas Browne puts it, the diuturnity of relics — has increased all over the world in 

 every centre of civilisation. A constant stream of objects flows into the great 

 treasuries of human inheritance— about 400,000 separate objects being received 

 into the British Museum in Bloomsbury per annum, and there is scarcely a capital 

 in Europe, or a big town in America, in which congestion is not already being felt. 



In a museum you shall find not only the loincloth or feathers of the savage, but 

 an almost perfect series of costumes worn by man down through the ages 

 in any country. Man's past in particular is preserved with the tenderest care. It 

 is possible to go and with the utmost pride and self-satisfaction observe the mile- 

 stones of our progress from the arrow-head to the modern rifle, from the sedan 

 chair and hobby-horse to the motor-cycle and aeroplane, from the spinning wheel 

 to the modern loom, from the Caxton printing press to the linotype, from 

 Stephenson's "Rocket" to the railway express engine, from the windbag of the Roman 

 invaders to the latest ocean greyhound in miniature. It is all there : china, 

 tobacco pipes, door-handles, iron railings, bedsteads, clavichords, buttons, lamps, 

 vases, sherds, bones, Babylonian and Hittite tablets, the Moabite stone, the 

 autographs and MSS. of every one who was anybody since writing came into 

 common practice, scarabs and coins, scarabs of the Rameses and Amenheteps, 



