6 STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL chap. 



of manufacture of the more important minerals, and their 

 application to the arts and sciences. To give a local in- 

 terest, all British specimens should be placed on tablets of 

 one distinct colour, so as at once to catch the eye, and 

 enable the student to form some idea of the comparative 

 productiveness of his own country. 



Botany. — The series of specimens to illustrate the 

 science of botany in a popular museum may be of two 

 kinds : such as show the main facts of plant-structure and 

 classification ; and others to teach something of the 

 variety, the distribution, and the uses of plants. 



By means of specimens, dissections, drawings, and 

 models, the important radical differences of the great 

 primary divisions of plants — cellular and vascular — acro- 

 genous, endogenous, and exogenous — might be made 

 clearly manifest. Alongside of the drawings and dissec- 

 tions there should be cheap fixed microscopes, showing the 

 main structural differences, thus giving a reality and 

 intensity to the characters which drawings or descriptions 

 alone can never do. 



Each of the most important natural orders of plants 

 should next be illustrated by specimens of various kinds. 

 Their structure and essential characters should first be 

 shown, in the same way as the higher groups. Their geogra- 

 phical distribution should be marked out on small maps. 

 Good dried specimens, and, if necessary, drawings or 

 models of flowers or fruit, of the more characteristic and 

 remarkable species, should then be exhibited ; and along 

 with these, samples of whatever useful products are 

 derived from them. Where remarkable forest-trees occur 

 in an order, good coloured drawings of them should be 

 shown, as well as longitudinal and cross sections of their 

 wood. In the same, or an adjoining case, specimens or 

 casts of the most important fossil-plants of the same order 

 may be exhibited, illustrating their range backward into 

 past time. 



By such a scheme as this, in a comparatively small 

 space and with a small number of specimens, all that is of 

 most importance in the vegetable kingdom would be 

 shown. The attentive observer might learn much of 



