lyo NATURAL SCIENCE. March, 



a great public museum demand that it shall be furnished with a 

 " cooking apparatus for carnivora." 



When Mr. Ruskin requires beauty in a museum we are wholly 

 with him. What can be better than this: — "The first function 

 of a museum is to give example of perfect order and perfect 

 elegance, in the true sense of that test word, to the disorderly and 

 rude populace. Everything in its own place, everything looking its 

 best because it is theye ; nothing crowded, nothing unnecessary, 

 nothing puzzling." Or again, "Above all, let all things for popular 

 use be beautifully exhibited." Such a sentence should be borne as 

 phylactery on the apron of every curator. But when Mr. Ruskin 

 restricts beauty to " creatures in their perfectness" ; when he denies 

 " anatomical illustrations to the general public" ; when he writes such 

 pure Ruskinese as this : " Neither must you ever show bones, or guts, 

 or any other charnel-house stuff. Teach your children to know the 

 lark's note from the nightingale's ; the length of their larynxes is 

 their own business, and God's " ; then we do think that this honey- 

 tongued prophet of beauty proves himself no true seer. The beauty 

 of an animal or a plant is no more confined to its external form and 

 colouring than are the so-called diagnostic characters which dis- 

 tinguish it as a species apart. A sea-urchin •' in its perfectness " is a 

 beautiful object, so is the single richly-ornamented spine of such an 

 animal ; but this beauty is entirely the expression of a complicated 

 internal structure, which, when viewed under the microscope, reveals 

 a further beauty that should compel admiration even from Mr. Ruskin. 

 Take him on his own ground. He goes to the British Museum (in 

 1880) to see a duck's wing, and does not find exactly what he wants. 

 Away, then, with the shells and the monkey skeletons ; he must have 

 a gallery full of birds in flight ! " What on earth, or in air, is the use 

 to me of seeing their boiled sternums ? '•' Had Mr. Ruskin's flights 

 ever extended beyond his rhetoric, he would probably have found a 

 sternum quite as useful as a wing. Next he will be urging artists to 

 draw ships in full sail with never a spar to desecrate their canvas ; 

 the length of their masts is their own business, and the shipwright's. 



Apart from this feminine horror of " nasty skeletons," the paper 

 contains much that is valuably suggestive, and it is to be regretted that 

 no discussion took place on it. It is interesting to learn that Mr. 

 Ruskin does not approve of the Sunday opening of museums, that 

 while he would abjure all idea of financial profit, he would charge 

 a small sum for admission in order to keep out "the utterly squalid 

 and ill-bred portion of the people," and that, in his opinion, names of 

 the donors of objects " should cease to encumber either the cases 

 or the scientific guides to them." On points such as these the 

 opinions of professional museum curators would have been worth 

 recording. 



In these matters it should be remembered that Mr. Ruskin is no 

 mere visionary schemer. He has given evidence before Parlia- 



