1895* SOME CASUAL THOUGHTS ON MUSEUMS. 321 



parison the fantastic experiments of Thomas Toft and the finished 

 handiwork of the Almighty. 



Having got rid of human art and Umited ourselves to the true 

 sphere of geological science, we should still need, in a rehabilitated 

 and reconstructed geological museum which is to approach the ideal, 

 another very important change. The museum in Jermyn Street is, 

 confessedly, only a museum of English geology. Its collections are 

 the results of the zeal of the geological surveyors, and it is the rich 

 and manifold harvest they have gathered which is there housed. I 

 am never tired of preaching (and heretic though I be, I shall continue 

 my homily as long as I have breath) that the great bane of English 

 geology, as now learned and taught, is its parochial, and conse- 

 quently utterly misleading, character. 



There was once a parson who had two small livings in the north 

 of England at different periods of his Ufe, and he persuaded himself, 

 and wrote several books to prove, that almost every important event 

 in EngUsh history, including the landing of Julius Caesar and the 

 Battle of Hastings, had taken place in his parishes in Yorkshire. 

 This is precisely the attitude of the men who are responsible for some 

 of the most elaborate and astounding memoirs on geology which have 

 appeared in recent years under high patronage, and deal with some of 

 the most intricate problems of physical science. These authors have 

 never studied physics or mathematics at all, or only in the most 

 perfunctory fashion. They know next to nothing of the mechanical 

 properties of matter, and they have a contempt for the postulates 

 of the more exact sciences. But this is not all. They know hardly 

 anything, either at first- or second-hand, of the foreign representatives 

 of the English beds. Some of them think that all the secrets of the 

 universe are concealed in half-a-dozen chalk-pits in East Anglia, and 

 that it only needs a few weeks' sojourn in these holes to find Aladdin's 

 lamp. Others, who have never seen a glacier and have never tried an 

 experiment on ice, write great volumes, and get them published at the 

 expense of the taxpayer, upon some of tlie most crooked issues of 

 physics, which can no more be solved by internal cogitation than the 

 famous camel could be produced by the German metaphysician in the 

 same way. This is the actual basis upon which a good deal of recent 

 English geology has been built, and is it wonderful that the teaching 

 is reflected in our museum? as well as in our text-books ? 



The burden of this oft-repeated diatribe is that, if we are to know 

 the history of our great mother, Gaea, which we profess to narrate 

 under the term geology, we must go further afield than surveying 

 half a dozen parishes or half an English county with no better tools 

 and preparation than a land-surveyor's pencil and levelling dial, and 

 no wider experience than can be got out of a single mountain valley 

 or two. We must also know how our explanations will meet the case 

 of similar phenomena elsewhere ; we must know what others belter 

 trained than ourselves have written on these problems abroad ; we 



