256 Report of a Journey Around the World. 



a single great war vessel would put any of the national museums 

 in working order. London, Berlin, Vienna, Paris, Washington, 

 New York, have this cataloguing work laid upon their shoulders v 

 and so far as biology is concerned are perhaps doing all that can 

 be expected, although the great advance in the modern methods 

 of illustration will, if not at once, certainly at no distant day add 

 a new value to these catalogues. 



In ethnology the case seems somewhat different. England is 

 not doing what her great wealth, vastly extended dominion over 

 so many and varied races, would seem to be her share in the general 

 accumulation of material, if not her actual duty. Germany has 

 gone beyond England not merely in the number of local museums, 

 often possessors of large and choice collections from all over the 

 world, but also in the central museum in Berlin, which, when its 

 present temporary difficulties are relieved by a more convenient 

 and extensive habitation, may well lead the world in its ethnologi- 

 cal catalogues. Lists not merely of dry names but fully illustrated 

 catalogues ratsouues, which will describe implements and products 

 as fully as the British Museum catalogues describe, for example, 

 the birds and their eggs. Russia has done and is doing more than 

 England to collect and study information of the heterogeneous 

 tribes and peoples of her great territory. 1 England has left to pri- 

 vate students and observers the study of her Australasian peoples, 

 perhaps because her great museum has not got so good a collection 

 of Australian, Maori and Papuan specimens as have several of the 

 local museums in these colonies. Of India she has a better repre- 

 sentation, but even there we look rather to the work of private 

 students than to the publications of the great central museum. 



For a moment let me turn to local museums such as our own, 

 which is typical of the class to which I have reference. The Bernice 

 Pauahi Bishop Museum is of private endowment, wholly free from 

 Government assistance or control ; it is not a purely educational 

 institution like the Horniman Museum in London ; it is not for the 



1 It should be noted that the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences has. 

 perhaps more branches and museums than any other similar academy : of 

 museums alone there are The Asiatic, Numismatic, Kthnographic-Anthro- 

 pologic of Peter the Great, Geological, Botanical, and Zoological. Besides 

 these the Central Physical Observatory with which are connected the obser- 

 vatories at Irkutsk, Ekaterinburg, Pawlowsk and Tiflis. 



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