President’s Address. 175 
which must be so familiar to all of you, but surely it is clear 
that to any one who approaches Nature from the scientific 
standpoint, and be it borne in mind that that need not 
exclude the esthetic, a natural history museum, fairly well 
stocked and properly looked after, must be a place of great 
interest indeed. 
Such being at least my own feelings on the subject, I must 
confess to having felt some amount of surprise when a little 
more than four years ago I saw “The Dulness of Museums” 
put down as the title of a paper in the Wineteenth Century, 
by the late Rev. J. G. Wood—the author being a man of 
considerable reputation as a writer of popular works on 
natural history. This article excited a good deal of attention 
at the time, and most of the comments made upon it, in the 
_ newspapers at least, were, so far as 1 remember, favourable to 
the views of Mr Wood. What these views were—wherein 
the dulness of museums lay in the eyes of Mr Wood, and 
by what means he proposed to enliven them—we shall 
presently see. 
Meanwhile, it became very clear that, in the opinion of many 
of those who had a genuine interest in the subject, there was in 
most, if not in all of our existing museums, much room for 
improvement and reform. A paper by Professor Herdman 
of Liverpool, on the “Ideal Natural History Museum,” 
appeared much about the same time as Mr Wood’s article 
above referred to, and these were followed presently by an 
essay by Mr A. R. Wallace in the Fortnightly Review, in 
which he makes an account of a visit to the Museum of 
Comparative Zoology at Cambridge, Massachusetts, into a 
lesson for those who have to do with museums at home. In 
1886 the British Association appointed a committee to 
inquire into the provincial museums of Great Britain and 
Ireland, and two reports from this committee were published 
in the Z'ransactions of the Association for 1887 and 1888 
respectively. In 1889 Professor W. H. Flower gave a very 
valuable presidential address on the subject of museums to 
the members of the British Association at the Newcastle 
meeting, and there has also been recently published a report 
by the same eminent authority on the condition of the 
