284 Dr. J. E. Gray on Museums and thew Uses. 
from so doing by the conviction that, in order to be of any real 
utility, such a Report should be of much greater length and fulness 
of detail than the time at our disposal would fairly admit for the 
reading, or than the few weeks which have elapsed since I was re- 
quested to undertake the office would allow of my preparing. This 
is, however, the less to be regretted, inasmuch as, in the course of 
each year, a body of laborious and talented German professors are in 
the habit of preparing a very full and complete Report of this nature 
for the Berlin ‘ Archives of Natural History,’ after a plan similar to 
that which I myself commenced, more than forty years ago, in 
Thomson’s ‘ Annals of Philosophy.’ I have therefore abandoned all 
intention of attempting such a review, and proceed at once to speak 
of subjects having a more general bearing upon the interests of our 
science. 
I should wish to say a few words on the subject of Public Museums. 
It may be well imagined that, having the whole of my life been in- 
timately connected with the management of what I believe to be at 
the present day the most important zoological museum in the world, 
it is a subject that has long and deeply occupied my thoughts; and 
it will also be readily believed that it is only after serious and pro- 
longed consideration I have come to the conclusion that the plan 
hitherto pursued in their arrangement has rendered them less useful 
to science and less interesting to the public at large than they might 
have been made under a different system. Let us consider the pur- 
poses for which such a museum is established. 
These are two: Ist, the diffusion of instruction and rational 
amusement among the mass of the people; and 2nd, to afford the 
scientific student every possible means of examining and studying 
the specimens of which the museum consists. Now, it appears 
to me that, in the desire to combine these two objects, which are 
essentially distinct, the first object, namely the general instruction 
of the people, has been to a great extent lost sight of and sacrificed 
to the second, without any corresponding advantage to the latter, 
because the system itself has been thoroughly erroneous. The 
curators of large museums have naturally, and, perhaps, properly, 
been men more deeply devoted to scientific study than interested in 
elementary instruction, and they have consequently done what they 
thought best for the promotion of science by accumulating and 
exhibiting on the shelves or in the open cases of the museum every 
specimen which they possess, without considering that by so doing 
they were overwhelming the general visitor with a mass of umintelli- 
gible objects, and at the same time rendering their attentive study 
by the man of science more difficult and onerous than if they had 
been brought into a smaller space and in a more available condition. 
What ‘the largest class of visitors, the general public, want, is a 
collection of the more interesting objects so arranged as to afford the 
greatest possible amount of information in a moderate space, and to 
be obtained, as it were, at a glance. On the other hand, the scientific 
student requires to have under his eyes and in his hands the most 
