1895. CASUAL THOUGHTS ON MUSEUMS. 



99 



mass of whom are very poor and forlorn, and have no chance of 

 seeing and knowing what Nature is like, what country flowers and 

 butterflies and birds are like, and who crowd the museum at times 

 quite delighted with what they see. Still more delighted if some 

 casual Philistine, like myself, takes a party of them round and tries 

 to convey to them some rags and tatters of dislocated knowledge. 

 This is one class for which "the British room" provides. There is, 

 however, another class— the great army of London public schoolboys 

 — who come with their specimens to label and to identify, and who 

 also come to patronise and to teach their sisters that crabs are not a 

 kind of fish, and that shells are not half so interesting as their nasty, 

 slimy contents which " the girls " habitually throw away. 



The only difference between this particular department of the 

 British Museum and of a provincial museum is that, London being so 

 big and so cosmopolitan, this part of the collection ought to be con- 

 terminous with Britain itself instead of with some particular county, 

 and the British collection there ought to be a model for the local 

 collections elsewhere. Is it such a model now ? Who can truly 

 say so ? If we exclude the butterflies and moths arranged by Lord 

 Walsingham, which are incomparable, the birds' eggs arranged by 

 Mr. Seebohm, and some of the crustaceans and echinoderms, do the 

 rest of the collections fulfil any purpose whatever, except to arouse 

 astonishment and disgust ? The' mammals are grotesque ; they give 

 one the impression that English wild beasts are nearly all suffering 

 from the mange, and that they have habitually a grin on their faces 

 suggesting their living continually with a dentist, while their pro- 

 truding eyes and misshapen bodies are too grotesque for anything. 

 The Chillingham ox is assuredly unmatched in any show in the 

 world. Nor does one of the specimens show how the animals live, 

 or what food they feed upon. They are merely bad furriers' specimens, 

 and they ought to be carted away. 



The birds are almost as bad — for the most part old worn-out 

 specimens, badly stuffed, dirty and dusty, and suggestive of a 

 lumber room. The real collection of English birds, than which 

 nothing could be better and more attractive in every way, is not in 

 the British room at all, but distributed partially upstairs and par- 

 tially in the room containing the general ornithological collection, 

 where it is quite out of place. The unrivalled series ought to be 

 brought together into a British room, with adequate accommodation, 

 and supplemented by a series of mammals similarly mounted, and all 

 the present specimens in the British room moved off to any limbo 

 whatever. 



If we turn from these to the fish and reptiles the case is worse. 

 Such horrors as the fish and reptiles in our museums are, were never 

 contemplated in any scheme of nature. After Frank Buckland, and 

 especially Mr. Else at Torquay, have shown us how to preserve fish 

 so that they look something like fish and not like the properties of a 



