182 Proceedings of the Royal Physical Socrety. 
2. These groups, unless absolutely well done and absolutely 
realistic, are of no scientific value; and to secure those con- 
ditions requires an enormous expenditure of money, as well 
as an enormous amount of space. It is all very well to 
refer to the great beauty and attractiveness of the, in many 
respects, charming set of cases illustrating the nesting habits 
of British birds in the Natural History Museum at Cromwell 
Road, South Kensington. These are the only really good 
things of the kind I ever saw, and, as they are as nearly as 
possible realistic representations of certain facts, they may 
be accepted as bona fide scientific specimens. But they have 
already cost a very great deal of money,—far beyond the 
resources of any other museum in the country, unless 
other things, more important from a scientific point of 
view, are starved or sacrificed; while inferior things, such 
as the groups we often see in the bird-stuffers’ shops, 
with brown paper rocks, powdered glass for snow, and 
animals drinking at looking glasses for water, are simply 
ridiculous. 
Again, to set up all the animals which it is desirable to 
exhibit in a public museum in a thoroughly realistic way 
would, even if it were possible to do so, require an amount 
of space far beyond the resources of an ordinary museum. 
And to show you what may be the result when space is 
small and absolute realism not sought for, let me refer to 
what I have seen in a public museum in a flourishing 
inanufacturing town, the curator of which is a man of real 
ability. This was the condition of matters which I found 
when I visited that museum two years ago. To be scientific, 
the birds were classified according to zoological affinities ; and 
to be attractive to Tom, Dick, and Harry, they were pictorially 
mounted on trees, with accompaniment of grass, leaves, ete. 
Now, who ever saw a flock of birds all belonging to one 
natural group, and at the same time natives of different 
countries and regions, all perched close together at the same 
time and on the same tree? But the treatment of the stuffed 
fishes was still more remarkable. You all know that by no 
amount of taxidermic ingenuity can you make a stuffed fish 
look as if it were fresh or alive, but here they were swumming 
