ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM. 323 
required scientific attainments. Of late years, under 
the zealous and unremitting care of Mr. Duncan, 
the Ashmolean Museum, as we understand, has 
been re-arranged, and has received many valuable 
additions. We have been likewise assured, that a 
more general feeling in favour of the physical 
sciences pervades at Oxford than heretofore, and 
that there is a strong desire, among several in- 
fluential members, to follow up the examples already 
exhibited at Cambridge. It must not be concealed, 
however, that this exclusion of zoology, as a “ part 
and parcel” of our academic studies, is a national 
stigma: that it has repeatedly been adverted to, in 
terms of regret and of censure, by our own writers ; 
and that it calls forth the astonishment and reproach 
of every enlightened foreigner. A stranger, ig- 
norant of our national peculiarities, would almost 
imagine, from the rigour with which their study is 
enforced, that the writings of the heathen poets were 
peculiarly adapted to purify the heart, and curb the. 
licentiousness of the youthful imagination ; or that 
they formed, in some inexplicable way, a string of 
commentaries upon our religious creed.* And he 
might be further led to suppose that those wonders 
of the visible creation, which, when considered, will 
bring home conviction to the philosophic sceptic, 
were unworthy of study or regard, as if they were 
things of mere chance, — produced by a congregation 
_ of fortuitous atoms, alike incapable of demonstrating 
* See the admirable remarks bearing on this subject in 
Forster’s Essays, 8th ed. p. 348—374. 
be 
