XIII THE PUBLIC GALLERIES 185 



perfectly and distinctly seen, with a clear space 

 round it. Every specimen exhibited should be 

 good of its kind, and all available skill and care 

 should be spent upon its preservation, and on 

 rendering it suitable for teaching the lesson it is 

 intended to convey." Flower may very possibly 

 have had in his mind at this time the exquisite 

 specimens which adorn the public galleries of 

 Mineralogy at the Museum. 



The ** instructional " arrangement of the minerals, 

 which so impressed Flower by its symmetry and 

 logical order that he referred to it as a type of what 

 he wished done in the exposition of system in 

 the organic world, is adorned by the very finest 

 specimens which the Museum possesses, and many 

 of them the most beautiful which have ever been 

 found on the earth's surface or in the dark un- 

 fathomed caves beneath it. The finest emerald in 

 the Museum, partly bedded in the rock in which it 

 lay, the most resplendent masses of amethysts, of 

 garnets, of rubellite or felspar, are matched and even 

 eclipsed in beauty, and greatly surpassed in size, 

 by other natural objects of such colour, shape, and 

 variety as the imagination, not fed by facts, could 

 never dream of, from the mines of the Andes, or of 

 Alaska, the precipices of the Alps, the caverns of 

 Cumberland, or the mountains of Styria. But once 

 found, these beauties of the mineral world fre- 

 quently need no human treatment. It is otherwise 

 with the examples of birds, beasts, and fishes. 



