198 J. nOPKINSON FOEMATION AND 



I will venture to quote at some length, from a paper read by- 

 Professor Rudler before the Cymmrodorion Society in 1876.* 



"Having," he says, "for many years been officially connected 

 with a large museum in London, f I have naturally taken much, 

 interest in the formation and arrangement of collections, and have 

 seized every opportunity of studying natural-history museums — 

 metropolitan, provincial, and continental. In this way I have been 

 led to carefully note the characteristics of a large number of public 

 collections, and to compare what appear to me to be their respective 

 merits and demerits." 



Advocating, then, the formation of a central museum in "Wales, 

 he proceeds : "In forming such a museum, the one great object to 

 be steadily kept in view must be that of collecting, arranging, and 

 exhibiting all the natural productions of the Principality. Every 

 animal and vegetable, whether recent or fossil, every mineral and 

 rock, to be found within the limits of Wales, must be adequately 

 represented, so that the museum shall ultimately form a complete 

 exponent of Welsh natural history. But I would go beyond this. 

 Not only should the indigenous productions be exhibited, as 

 presented in their original condition, but the application of these 

 products to the arts of life should equally be illustrated. In other 

 words, the purely scientific department should be supplemented by 

 a technological collection, exhibiting the uses which we make of 

 the natural resources at our command." 



After stating that in such a museum the art and archaeology of 

 Wales ought not to be neglected, he continues : " Whilst we should 

 patriotically aspire to render the local collection as perfect as 

 possible, I would not, by any means, have the usefulness of the 

 museum stop here. Comparing any local collection with a general 

 collection, it will of course be found that many important groups 

 of animals, vegetables, and minerals are but imperfectly represented, 

 whilst others are altogether blank. There is, consequently, great 

 danger of very limited and inadequate notions of the great system 

 of nature being formed by the student who confines his attention to 



local natural history To counteract such a tendency, it 



is eminently desirable to form, under proper conditions, a general 

 collection which will give the visitor some notion of, at any rate, 



the larger groups in which natural bodies are classified 



There should conseqixently be two departments to our central 

 museum — one local, and the other general — each with distinct aims, 

 and each appealing to a distinct class of visitors. Differing thus 

 in their objects, it would be well to keep the two departments 

 entirely distinct, as is done, for example, in the Worcester Museum, 

 where a special room is devoted to the illustration of the natural 

 history of the county. Whilst our local collection ^vould certainly 

 give value to the museum iu the eyes of genuine students of science, 

 who would be attracted thither by the opportunity of taking a 



* ' On Natural History Museums, with Suggestions for the Formation of a 

 Central Museum in Wales.'— 1876. 



t The Museum of Practical Geology, Jermyn Street. 



