38 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [vi. 



Without it, no man can have a really sound knowledge of 

 animal organization. 



A good deal may be done, however, without actual dissection 

 on the student s part, by demonstration upon specimens and 

 preparations; and in all probability it would not be very 

 difficult, were the demand sufficient, to organize collections 

 of such objects, sufficient for all the purposes of elementary 

 teaching, at a comparatively cheap rate. Even without these, 

 much might be effected, if the zoological collections, which 

 are open to the public, were arranged according to what has 

 been termed the &quot;typical principle;&quot; that is to say, if the 

 specimens exposed to public view were so selected that the 

 public could leam something from them, instead of being, 

 as at present, merely confused by their multiplicity. For 

 example, the grand ornithological gallery at the British Museum 

 contains between two and three thousand species of birds, and 

 sometimes five or six specimens of a species. They are very 

 pretty to look at, and some of the cases are, indeed, splendid ; 

 but I will undertake to say, that no man but a professed 

 ornithologist has ever gathered much information from the 

 collection. Certainly, no one of the tens of thousands of the 

 general public who have walked through that gallery ever 

 knew more about the essential peculiarities of birds when 

 he left the gallery than when he entered it. But if, somewhere 

 in that vast hall, there were a few preparations, exemplifying 

 the leading structural peculiarities and the mode of develop 

 ment of a common fowl ; if the types of the genera, the 

 leading modifications in the skeleton, in the plumage at various 

 ages, in the mode of nidification, and the like, among birds, 

 were displayed ; and if the other specimens were put away 

 in a place where the men of science, to whom they are alone 

 useful, could have free access to them, I can conceive that 

 this collection might become a great instrument of scientific 

 education. 



The last implement of the teacher to which I have adverted 

 is examination a means of education now so thoroughly 



