leading step by step to the higher and more complex. In other words, 

 this Book should consist (as Sir William Flower, Professor Herdman and 

 others have urged) of Labels clearly printed, and fully but sunply 

 descriptive, whose illustrations are the specimens to which those labels 

 are attached. 



Although there is not (surprising as it may appear) in this country a 

 single museum arranged on these principles, there is no biologist but 

 admits that they are not only the ideal, but the only true and intelligible 

 principles on which a Museum should be arranged, and who does not on 

 every opportunity advocate their adoption in all new Museums. 



This scientific and only intelligible method the Director desires to 

 adopt, therefore, so as to present to the visitor the lowest form'? of 

 life in the Animal and Vegetable Kingdoms on his entrance, gradually 

 introducing him from room to room to those of nearest affinity, in 

 ascending order till the highest are reached. 



This requires necessarily more space than named specimens set side 

 by side, and broad-area-ed, rather than narrow galleries, because the 

 arrangement is not linear, but ramified, or tree-like.* The buildings in 

 which the Liverpool Free Museums are housed, are far from being as weU 

 constructed for the purposes of a Museum as they might be. Being, 

 however, where they are, impossible of fundamental alteration and 

 capable of being extended only in one direction, they may be to a 

 considerable degree improved by the addition of galleries, as in the 

 preliminary plans submitted to this Committee by Mr. \Miliuk, if these 

 galleries run contini-onsly through from those now occupied in the 

 present buildings, even although they must perforce be narrower than 

 could be desired. 



The accompanying plans (I., the ground floor ; II , the upper floor}— 

 which roughly follow Mr. Willink's — show in the unshaded portion 

 the existing accommodation ; in the proposed extension, the shaded 

 portions indicate the "minimum space which, in the opinion of the 

 Director, is required to exhibit not only in a scientific manner, but in 

 the only way which will be intelligible to the un-scientific visitor, the 

 collections already in the Museum. 



* The Members of the Committee are referred to an important Paper by Prof. W. A. 

 Herdman, F.R.S., on An Ideal Natural History Museum. — Proa Lit. and Phil. Soc. 

 Liverpool — in which the phylogenetic arrangement is advocated as essential. 



