i8g6. CASUAL THOUGHTS ON MUSEUMS. 117 



by what they see in their museum. I do not know, and I do not care, 

 who is responsible for the state of things, but it is simply shocking to 

 look over the cases devoted to palaeontology. A more distressing 

 show it is impossible to conceive : the specimens neglected and dirty, 

 many of the type-specimens illustrating Phillip's Monograph of 

 Oxford Geology unlabelled, the great collections from Kirkdale of our 

 Father Anchises, Dr. Buckland, still in the hampers in which they 

 were sent to the museum. How it is possible for an impressionable 

 man to feel anything but loathing for fossils and their teaching after 

 looking at this show, I do not know ; and it is made more hideous 

 when contrasted with the beautiful and most instructive prepara- 

 tions which are rapidly filling the cases in charge of Professor Ray 

 Lankester and his assistants, to whom these neglected fossils might 

 well be handed over. 



Let us pass on, however ! The burden of this homily is the 

 exhibiting of the fossil and the recent specimens together in a 

 biological museum. Now shells, whether of molluscs or brachiopods, 

 are perhaps the most valuable of all things for showing the continuity 

 that exists in nature ; they run right through the geological record. 

 In the case of large groups, like the ammonites, we can trace the 

 intergradation of forms by the introduction of very small differences ; 

 we can see certain stocks represented at one horizon by a few kinds 

 only, and in the next, perhaps, breaking into an afflatus of change, so 

 that we get an immense number of species appearing, and then again 

 as sudden a shrinkage. Lastly, we have the very interesting fact that 

 certain genera such as Lingula have been persistent right through the 

 long story of life. These, and other facts like these, are what arouse 

 men's interest and invigorate men's ideas far more than looking at 

 half-a-dozen cases full of beautiful shells. How are they to be 

 illustrated unless we show our fossil forms and our recent forms 

 together, instead of separating them and putting them at two remote 

 poles of the museum ? How is the student of fossil shells, especially 

 of Tertiary and Post-Tertiary shells, to understand them or to 

 classify them unless he is steeped to the finger-ends in a knowledge 

 of the recent shells ? And how is a man to understand the recent 

 shells who never comes in contact with those ancestral forms, most of 

 which are extinct, and which are so necessary to the proper inter- 

 pretation of their descendants ? Not only so, but it seems impossible 

 to avoid creating fictitious species (which mislead us all in our induc- 

 tion, when following Lyell in discriminating the Tertiary beds by the 

 proportion of extinct forms which they contain) if these Tertiary 

 shells are discussed and described by men who have not a direct and 

 intimate knowledge of the recent forms. 



For these various reasons it seems to me as plain as can be that 

 the fossil shells and the recent shells should be exhibited together 

 and should be looked after and described by a common staff. This 

 does not mean that the same man should have the same minute 



