176 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
Oxford University Museum, embodying suggestions ior its 
improvement and reform. On the Continent also, Professor 
Mobius, Director of the Zoological Museum in Berlin, has a 
few weeks ago published in the Deutsche Rundschau, a paper 
on the subject of natural history museums, so that you may 
here ask me, is not the subject already exhausted—is there 
anything more to say on it ? 
Well, the subject is an enormously wide one, and I venture 
to think that the ground has not been entirely covered in the 
literature to which I have referred. Nor do I consider the 
discussion to be entirely closed as regards many of the points 
raised by recent writers. If, then, I have chosen as a subject 
on which to address you this evening, one in which I may 
embody some of the results at which I have arrived in the 
course of my seventeen years experience as an official in a 
public museum, I do so without in the least way imagining 
that the last word will be said for a good long time to come. 
The key to the whole position seems to me to rest in the 
answer to the question— What is a Natural History Museum, 
and what is its use? The original signification of the word, 
“home of the Muses,” does not help us, as unfortunately 
there was no muse of natural history, and Urania, the only 
one of the nine who had scientific leanings, had astronomy 
as her speciality. To my mind the meaning of the whole 
matter is this—the study of natural history cannot be carried 
on without the use of specimens; a museum is simply the 
place where such specimens are kept, and the business of the 
curator and his assistants is to have them arranged in such 
a manner as will render them best available for the study 
and instruction of all classes and degrees of people who may 
be interested in them. Of course the duty of seeing that 
they are properly preserved, identified, and labelled goes 
without saying, but that is a part of the subject into which 
I need not at present enter. 
It is not necessary, far from it, that all the contents 
of a public museum should be exposed in glass cases, 
though the “public” have often strange ideas on this sub- 
ject. I once had opened a drawer of bird skins in one of our 
galleries, when a young man came up to me and indignantly 
