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IV. 



Casual Thoughts on Museums. 



Part V. — Anthropology. 



THAT some men and most boys are beasts we learn when we are 

 very young from the ordinary conversation of schoolboys and 

 draymen. The metaphor of these expressive rhetoricians is not only, 

 as everyone knows, confirmed by sober science, but has been extended 

 to all human beings. Man is no longer put in a separate order by him- 

 self, but is classed by the zoologist as the terminal link in the long 

 chain of life. The mysterious secrets of that chain increase, instead of 

 diminishing, with our knowledge, and its initial stages seem more 

 puzzling than ever, for many of the keys and explanations of recent 

 years resolve themselves into the substitution of one phrase for 

 another, and it is not illuminating to substitute a red fog for a black 

 one — but let that pass. 



That man is a beast, allied by his structure, etc., to other beasts, 

 is a scientific conclusion that has hardly yet penetrated into the 

 museum mind, a mind which carries on the systematic study of life 

 largely without any consideration of the one form of life about whose 

 structure, variation and conditions we know most, namely, that form 

 of which you and I are curious and perhaps unmatched examples. 



Is it not a most remarkable fact that in this great empire of ours, 

 with possessions in every climate and numbering men of all races 

 among its subjects, we should not have a single example anywhere 

 of an anthropological collection — I mean no collection in the least 

 representing or worthy of the subject ? 



At Cromwell Road, and in some local museums, there are small 

 and utterly inadequate and neglected and ill-arranged and uninterest- 

 ing collections of human skulls and a few skeletons. At the Museum 

 of the Royal College of Surgeons there is a larger collection of a 

 similar kind, supplemented by a magnificent series of preparations of 

 the internal organs and structure of human beings, and for the most 

 part of morbid cases. But these are in no wise sufficient. They seem 

 at present to exist merely for the purpose of exasperating the typical 

 systematist, who hates internal differenticT and loves to class his beasts 

 by the presence of patches of colour in the hair or feathers. I do not 

 mean by an anthropological collection a collection of dresses, weapons, 

 tools, etc., used by savages, or of the gorgeous neckties and waistcoats of 



