8 MUSEUMS. 
draw them to the public library, and the lecture room:’ This object 
you will, I think, admit that we may fairly claim to serve. I 
cannot imagine any man or woman, or even child, wandering even 
casually through these halls without his interest being aroused, his 
curiosity being stimulated, his mind made to work. But to arouse 
that interest usefully, arrangement and organisation are essential. 
‘It is not,’ says Sir William Flower, ‘the objects placed in a 
museum that constitute its value, so much as the method in which 
they are displayed, and the use made of them.’ 
“ As to that, I can only say that the wide scientific knowledge of 
our Director, Dr. Forbes, has led here to a system of arrange- 
ment at once popular and educational. But the Museum should do 
more than merely interest and amuse. It should aid in the 
advancement of learning, by affording to men of learning material 
for investigation, laboratories and appliances. It should ‘ stimulate 
original research in connection with its own collections, and publish 
its results.’ It should preserve for future study material on which 
studies have been made in the past, in order that those results may 
be confirmed, corrected, or modified. 
“It should be an adjunct to the class room and the lecture room, 
by placing at the disposal of teachers, whether of elementary, 
technical, or higher education, materials and opportunities for the 
illustration of their work, and it should aid the occasional enquirer, 
be he labouring man, school boy, journalist, public speaker or 
savant, to obtain without cost exact information on any subject 
relating to the scope of the institution. A museum should be, as it 
were, to science what illustrations are to a book: this museum 
should furnish illustrations to the great book of nature and of man. 
‘ One word more and I have done. The great Natural History Museum 
of Berlin adjoins the Zoological department of the University. I 
could wish there were the same proximity in Liverpool. But if 
there is physical separation, let there at least be organic union 
between the University on the one hand, and this magnificent range 
of institutions on the other. For ourselves, I can only say that we look 
eagerly to the time when this Museum shall be regarded, not as a 
