424 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
injuring either the one or the other. Each kind of those objects 
requires for its preservation special considerations and special 
manipulations; and by representing them in each of the several 
departments you would have to double your staff of skilled 
manipulators, with their apparatus, which means multiplying your 
expenses. Departmental administration generally, and especially 
the system of acquisition by purchase or exchange, would become 
extremely complicated, and could not be carried on without a 
considerably greater expenditure in time and money. Thus, even 
if the old departmental division were abandoned for one corre- 
sponding to the principal classes of the animal kingdom, each of 
the new departments would still continue to keep, for consideration 
of conservation, those different kinds of objects, at least locally, 
separate. The necessity of this has been so much felt in the 
British Museum, that the Trustees resolved to store the spirit- 
specimens at South Kensington, in a building specially adapted 
for the purpose, and separated from the main building, as the 
accumulation of many thousand gallons of spirits is a source of 
danger which not many years ago threatened the destruction of a 
portion of the present building in Bloomsbury. 
I could never see that by the juxtaposition of extinct and 
living animals the student would obtain particular facilities for 
study, or that the general public would derive greater benefit than 
they may obtain, if so inclined, from one of the numerous popular 
books; they would not be much the wiser if the Archeopteryx 
were placed in a passage leading from the reptile- to the bird- 
gallery. And it certainly cannot be said that the separation of 
living and extinct organisms, so universally adopted in the old 
museums, has been a hindrance to the progress of our knowledge 
of the development of the organic world. This knowledge 
originated and advanced in spite of museums-arrangements. What 
lies at the bottom of the desire for such a change amounts, in 
reality, to this, that museums should be the practical exponents 
of the principle that zoologists and botanists should not be 
satisfied with the study of the recent fauna and flora, and that 
paleontologists should not begin their studies or carry on their 
researches without due and full reference to living forms. To 
this principle every biologist will most heartily subscribe; but the 
local separation of the various collections in the British Museum 
will not offer any obstacles whatever to its being carried out. 
