NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 



mental development, his manners, customs, traditions, and 

 languages. The illustrations of his works of art, domestic 

 utensils, and weapons of war are essential parts of its study. 

 In fact it is impossible to say where it ends. It includes all 

 that man is or ever has been, all that he has ever done. No 

 definite line can be drawn between the rudest flint weapon and 

 the most exquisitely finished instrument of destruction which 

 has ever been turned out from the manufactory at Elswick, 

 between the rough representation of a mammoth, carved by one 

 of its contemporary men on a portion of its own tusk, and the 

 most admirable production of a Landseer. An anthropological 

 collection, to be logical, must include all that is in not only the 

 old British Museum but the South Kensington Museum and 

 the National Gallery. The notion of an anthropology which 

 considers savages and prehistoric people as apart from the rest 

 of mankind may, in the limitations of human powers, have 

 certain conveniences, but it is utterly unscientific and loses 

 sight of the great value of the study in tracing the gradual 

 growth of our existing complex systems and customs from the 

 primitive ways of our progenitors. 



On the other hand, the division first indicated is as perfectly 

 definite, logical, and scientific as any such division can be. 

 That there are many inconveniences attending wide local 

 disjunctions of the collections containing subjects so distinct 

 yet so nearly allied as physical and psychical anthropology 

 must be fully admitted ; but these could only have been over- 

 come by embracing in one grand institution the various national 

 collections illustrating the different branches of science and 

 art, placed in such order and juxtaposition that their mutual 

 relations might be apparent, and the resources of each might 

 be brought to bear upon the elucidation of all the others an 

 ideal institution, such as the world has not yet seen, but into 

 which the old British Museum might at one time have been 

 developed. 



A purely " Natural History Museum " will then embrace a 

 collection of objects illustrating the natural productions of the 

 earth, and in its widest and truest sense should include, as far 

 as they can be illustrated by museum specimens, all the 

 sciences which deal with natural phenomena. It has only 



