11. 

 Some Casual Thoughts on iMuseums. 



Part II. 

 Geological Museums. 



IN a previous paper (Natural Science, vol. vii., p. 97) I ventured 

 to make some dislocated remarks on museums, especially on local 

 museums, and on that department of the great national museum 

 which answers to local museums elsewhere. I have been asked to 

 devote a little space to geological museums and their arrangement. 

 Here again the concrete seems to me more useful than the abstract, and 

 we have in London a notable instance of how very unmethodical great 

 teaching institutions may become if they grow up by mere hazard. 

 There is in Jermyn Street a first-rate geological museum, the only 

 one in this country. It is essentially a geological collection arranged 

 stratigraphically, and is in many respects a model of what such an 

 institution ought to be ; but in others it fails very materially. Its 

 situation is one of the worst in England, for it occupies a site so 

 valuable that there is no proper means of housing its staflF, or of 

 enlarging the collection itself, and its very existence is hardly known 

 to nine-tenths of the scientific world. It is the special child, first, of 

 the old School of Mines, and, secondly, of the Geological Survey, and 

 has naturally grown up on the spot occupied formerly by the great 

 teaching centre of geological science. So long as that remained there, 

 many reasons existed for retaining the museum in the same position, 

 but now that the great central Government school for teaching 

 geology has moved elsewhere, there is no longer the same excuse for 

 keeping the museum where it is. Few people know of its existence, 

 and it is really a very considerable light hidden under a very notable 

 bushel. The situation, too, is one where dirt and dust, the great 

 enemies of all collections, accumulate. The building is, in fact, the 

 home of one heroic story : was it not in one of its rooms that a 

 student of geology, being asked to distinguish between tvanspavent, 

 tmtislucent, and opaque, wrote down that he always preferred to define 

 by illustration ? " Thus," said he, " the window above me was once 

 transparent, it is now translucent, and it will speedily become opaque." 

 The rooms in which the staff of the museum and of the Geological 

 Survey are housed are a disgrace to a country like ours, and perhaps 



