40 EVOLUTION 



for the Ichthyosaurs and Plesiosaurs (Liassic 

 fish-dragons and swan-dragons) at the Crystal 

 Palace, where to this day there are some 

 weird survivals, but with inaccuracies which 

 were only too severely criticized. Now, how- 

 ever, the magnificent Central Natural History 

 Museum of New York has not a few examples 

 of this new branch of the animal sculptor's 

 art, which hardly yield in vividness and 

 convincingness to the life-like triumphs of 

 the best of museum taxidermists. Yet even 

 these are but a beginning; as the evolutionary 

 mode of presentment increasingly dominates 

 our collections, as already in the " Phyletic 

 Museum " which has been so appropriately 

 established as the Haeckel memorial at Jena, 

 or in the central hall of the Natural History 

 Museum in London, our galleries will in- 

 creasingly develop their panoramic renewal 

 of the forms of life throughout their evolution, 

 and will thus express the record of the 

 palaeontologist as a wonderland for the child 

 whose continual interest in strange beasts, a 

 delight thrilled with terror, is perhaps itself 

 a survival and a recapitulation of the past 

 mental experience of our race. 



