President's Address. 179 
himself be an industrious amateur collector. The difficulty 
is with regard to insects and fishes in spirit, for rare species 
may be irretrievably damaged by light, and I should therefore 
most certainly also, in the case of British or local zoology, 
have another and still larger reserve collection to be kept in 
the dark, and only shown to specialists as occasion requires ; 
and in these collections, specimens of insects, etc., which it 
would be difficult to replace should certainly be kept. 
I should certainly have the birds and beasts in the exhi- 
bited collections well stuffed—no horrid distorted abortions of 
bad taxidermy; but I should have them mounted on plain 
polished wood stands, and in like manner all the mountings 
and fittings and labels, though plain, should be in good taste 
and pleasing to the eye. For though Art is no part of the 
functions of a natural history museum, it adds much to the 
comfort and pleasure of those who examine the specimens if 
everything around looks well. 
But such an exhibited collection would have been pro- 
nounced to be “dull” by the late Mr Wood, and we may 
now inquire what he meant by that expression. He com- 
mences by saying, “ I speak on behalf of the general public,” 
and on reading his article we find that he does not mean 
even that part of the general public who have some sort of 
interest in natural history, but that unfortunately much 
larger part who have no manner of caring for the subject at 
all. It is on behalf of that class of people that he speaks of 
the eye becoming “painfully wearied by the monotony of 
long rows of beasts standing on flat boards, and of birds 
perched on short crutches, all looking intensely nowhere, and 
staring with extraordinary earnestness at nothing.” Speaking 
also of the wonderful “Index Collection” which Professor 
Flower is now getting together in the entrance hall of the 
New Natural History Museum at Cromwell Road, and which 
contains so many beautiful, instructive, and admirably 
labelled osteological and other anatomical preparations, he 
says, “ Now, what can Tom, Dick, and Harry know or care 
about the radius and ulna or the hyoid bones”? We who 
have to do with museums know this class of visitor very 
well—people who walk with perfect apathy through the 
