President's Address. 187 
Here Professor Flower evidently alludes to the arrangement 
of the fossils in our museums in a department distinct from 
that which contains the specimens of existing organisms. 
There is doubtless something in that, at least, so far as the 
popular mind is concerned, but, as regards the “scientific 
student,” I can scarcely withstand the temptation to throw 
a little of the blame on the narrowing tendency of the 
present fashionable type-system of teaching zoology, and 
the extensive concentration of the mind of the student on 
the subject of embryology. 
Two years before Professor Flower delivered his address 
at Newcastle, there had been a discussion in the biological 
section of the British Association at Manchester upon 
the very subject of how our museums might be reformed 
in this direction. So far as that discussion is concerned, 
I do not think it ended in very much, but the plan, 
which I then recommended, I am now endeavouring to 
carry out in the rearrangement of the Natural History 
Department of the Edinburgh Museum at present in 
progress. 
In the first place, recent and fossil organisms must be 
brought together, for the same life which animated the world 
in earliest geological times has been inherited by us at the 
present day. ! 
In the second, recent and fossil species of one genus must 
not be mixed in one case, because the collection would thereby 
be ruined for the geologist, while the zoologist would probably 
give you no thanks. 
A compromise must therefore be effected, and this is my 
plan. We divide the animal kingdom into classes in the 
usual acceptation of the term, such as Pisces, Amphibia, 
Reptilia, and so on, while we divide geological time into the 
great epochs as recognised by the majority of geologists at 
the present day. Then, under each great epoch of the world’s 
history in succession, from the Cambrian, it may be, up to 
and including the recent period, we arrange zoologically 
the representatives of one of the classes of the animal 
kingdom, and when we have thus brought that class up to 
the present day, we repeat the process with the next which 
