507. 377 



Casual Thoughts on Museums . 



Part IV. 1 — The Zoological Department of the British 



Museum. 



EVERYBODY knows that all well-regulated houses contain a 

 cupboard in which there is a skeleton, but it does not seem to 

 strike people, especially those who live in museums, that cupboards 

 are the most suitable and proper places for the majority of skeletons 

 to be housed in. A room full of skeletons is not the place for the 

 student in search of sweetness and light, and what it is supposed to 

 teach no one quite knows. If we are to compare bones and thus to 

 discriminate between different forms, it is no use having them 

 articulated. The student who is advanced enough to appreciate these 

 distinctions will learn little or nothing from bones linked together by 

 iron wire, while the casual visitor, who ought to be taught that a 

 skeleton is the necessary scaffolding upon which every animal is 

 moulded, ought, if he is to learn anything, to see the skeleton in 

 juxtaposition with the stuffed skin and with some of the soft parts. 



Under any circumstances, if skeletons are to be exhibited, it 

 seems monstrous to separate entirely the recent and. the fossil ones. 

 The replacement of gelatine by carbonate of lime is not a process 

 •confined to buried bones, as my own gouty fingers tell me. 



For these several reasons, everyone will welcome the change 

 contemplated by Sir William Flower, by which the Dead-House in 

 the upper storey of the Natural History Museum is no longer to 

 furnish subjects for nightmares to nurses and children, and this very 

 fine exhibition gallery is to be devoted to a much more sensible show. 

 It is to be hoped that a large proportion of the skeletons will be duly 

 placed in cupboards and the rest distributed between the galleries 

 containing the stuffed animals and those containing the fossil ones. 



I will venture a few words about each of these departments and 

 the function exhibited skeletons ought to fulfil in them. In limine, let 

 me give one more groan over the almost criminal folly and obstinacy 

 by which the Museum was so planned that, while the fossil beasts 

 are on the ground floor, the stuffed ones are upstairs, the whole logical 

 sequence of the arrangement being inverted. The expense and 

 trouble of changing the plan are so great as to make it almost 



1 For Parts I., II., and III. see Natural Science, vol. vii., pp. 97 and 319, and 

 •vol. viii., p. 114. 



2 E 



