180 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Society. 
most interesting collections, who do not even trouble them- 
selves to read any of the labels, and who go out, as Mr Wood 
says, “not one whit wiser than when they came in.” Mr 
Wood also remarks that much of the same indifference is to 
be observed in the visitors to art galleries. “The general 
visitors stroll listlessly through the building, utterly failing 
to appreciate a single beauty of canvas or marble, and some- 
times openly avowing that they wonder why people should 
make such a fuss about faded pictures and battered statues. 
To their eyes the grand contours of the Theseus Torso and the 
divine grace of the Milo Venus are invisible.” He even owns 
that to himself “a collection of blue china is dulness itself.” 
How Mr Wood proposes to deal with this dense ignorance 
and apathy as regards painting and sculpture he does not 
say; but as regards natural history he proposes that, in 
addition to the museum for the various sorts of people whom 
I have indicated at the commencement of these remarks, 
there should be a special museum for Tom, Dick, and Harry, 
“which should amuse them, should be of such a nature as to 
compel them to take an interest in the subject, and perchance 
to transform them into the Thomas H. Huxleys, Richard 
Owens, and P. Henry Gosses of the next generation.” This 
museum should consist, “not of isolated animals, but of 
groups, some large and some small, but all representing 
actual episodes in the life-history of the animals exhibited.” 
In fact, this museum is to consist of groups of animals 
“pictorially mounted,” amid artificial representations of 
scenery. 
Mr Wood owns that his scheme is Utopian or ideal, and 
certainly there does not seem much immediate prospect of a 
separate museum being constructed on sucha principle even 
in wealthy London. Yet the notion that the exhibited speci- 
mens in a public museum should be pictorially mounted, and 
not plainly and simply set up to display their zoological 
characters, is one which has a very considerable hold on the - 
minds of a great number of people, and in some museums 
may be seen attempts to realise it. The idea seems to be, 
that as the acquisition of knowledge is distasteful to a great 
many people, something must be done to “ gild the pill,” and 
