President's Address. 183 
about in the air in a case or cases, with stones, sand, and 
_ dried starfishes at the bottom ; while to give a conventional 
idea of water (a very conventional one indeed!), a brush 
with bluish-green varnish had in some places been drawn 
horizontally across the glass of the front of the case. Did 
the artist, who used his brush in so bold a way, ever see any 
such bluish-green horizontal lines across the glass of an 
actual tank filled with water in an aquarium? I do think 
that, in this case, it would have been much better if the birds 
and fishes had been plainly set up on stands, without any 
attempt to amuse the public by “ pictorialism.” 
But where is this to stop? At the vertebrates? No, not 
in the opinion of some; for I have recently read a letter, 
published in a southern paper, from a gentleman who 
advocates the principle that, in a local museum, the entire 
local fauna should be set up pictorially in groups repre- 
senting the life-history of the species, and in this letter the 
words occur: “Every animal species native to the district 
which it is possible so to display must be treated in a similar 
manner, even down to the beetles and worms.” Well, I 
must say that if I were called upon to set up “ pictorially ” 
all the beetles of Midlothian, and all the worms of the Firth 
of Forth, I should be inclined to give it up as a bad job, as 
well as to consider the project an utterly vain and useless 
one besides. | 
And if this “pictorial” method is desirable for recent 
organisms, in order to make the general public take an 
interest in them, why not also for fossil ones? What can 
be more utterly dull to our friends Tom, Dick, and Harry, 
than rows of fossils mounted on tablets with terrible names 
attached to them, like Dikelocephalus or Goniasteroidocrinus ? 
Let palzontology, then, be represented by a scenic model of 
the interior of a stone quarry, where the fossils shall be lying 
about on the ground, or some of them seen half sticking out 
of the rock; and perhaps, to add further interest to the scene, 
the effigy of a savant should be represented with his hammer 
breaking open a huge block of stone, from the interior of 
which the welcome features of the Missing Link burst upon 
his astonished gaze. This ought to take! 
