STUDIES, SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL 



VOL. II 



CHAPTER I 



MUSEUMS FOR THE PEOPLE 



MUSEUMS of Natural History should be, one would 

 think, among the most entertaining and instructive of 

 public exhibitions, since their object is to show us life-like 

 restorations of all those wonderful and beautiful animals, 

 the mere description of which in the pages of the traveller, 

 the naturalist, or the sportsman, are of such absorbing 

 interest. Strange to say, however, such is by no means 

 generally the case ; and these institutions rarely appear to 

 yield either pleasure or information at all proportionate 

 to their immense cost. We can hardly impute this failure 

 to anything in the nature of museums or of their contents, 

 when we remember that good illustrated works on natural 

 history are universally interesting and instructive; and 

 that private collections of birds, shells, or insects are often 

 very attractive even to the uninitiated, and at the same 

 time of the highest value to the student. We must 

 therefore seek for an explanation of the anomaly in the 

 system on which public museums are usually constituted, 

 in the quality of the specimens they exhibit, and in the 

 mode of exhibiting them, all which, it is now generally 

 admitted, are equally unsuited for the amusement and 

 instruction of the public and for the purposes of the 

 scientific student. 



VOL. II B 



