ADDRESS TO BIOLOGICAL SECTION, BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 423 
has now been supplied with the space requisite for a collection of 
rocks, with a laboratory and goniometrical room. Geology is 
now in a position to exhibit a great part of the Invertebrata, 
which hitherto had to be deposited in private studies, besides 
devoting one or two of the new galleries to a stratigraphical series. 
On the Zoological side we have been great gainers, not with 
regard to the proportion of space, but inasmuch as we were more 
impeded by the crowded state of our collections than any of the 
other departments: we are enabled to avoid the exhibition of 
heterogeneous objects in the same room or gallery: mammals, 
birds, reptiles, fishes, mollusks, insects, echinoderms, corals, and 
sponges have each a smaller or larger gallery to themselves. 
With the exception of the specimens preserved in spirits, the 
study-series can be located in contiguity with, or at least close 
vicinity to, the exhibition series. ‘There is ample and con- 
venient accommodation for students; besides a spacious room, 
centrally situated, and arranged for the exclusive use of students, 
this class of visitors can be accommodated at four other different 
localities immediately adjoining the several branches of the 
collection. 
I believe that some of the members of the British Association 
will feel somewhat disappointed that the Zoological and Botanical 
collections on the one hand, and the Paleontological on the other, 
continue to be kept distinct. Who will, who can, doubt that the 
two branches of Biological science would be immensely benefited 
by being studied in their natural mutual relations? and that 
Paleontology, more especially, would have made surer progress if 
its study had been conducted with more direct application to the 
series of living forms? But to study the series of extinct and 
living forms in their natural connection is one thing, and to 
incorporate in a museum the collection of fossil with that of recent 
forms is another. The latter proposal, so excellent in theory, 
would offer in its practical execution so many and insuperable 
difficulties that we may well hesitate before we recommend the 
experiment to be tried in so large a collection as the British 
Museum. I have mentioned above that in a small collection such 
an arrangement may be feasible to a certain degree; but in a large 
collection you cannot place skins, bones, spirit-preparations, and 
stones in the same room, or perhaps in the same case, exposing 
them to the same conditions of light and temperature, without 
