254 
NATURE 
[Juty 13, 1899 
is most certainly true of the second portion of his 
scientific life, which dates from his appointment in 1884 
to the directorship of the Natural History Museum, and 
was preceded by twenty years of work as Hunterian 
Curator. There can be no doubt in the mind of any 
man who is acquainted with the present condition of the 
public galleries of the great museums of natural history 
in Europe, and with the condition which characterised 
those of similar institutions in’ Great Britain previously 
to the year 1864, that a very great and important change 
for the better was effected by Flower, first of all at the 
College of Surgeons, and later in accordance with a 
further development of his ideas, at the Natural History 
Museum (British Museum, Natural History). The 
arrangement and exhibition of specimens designed and 
carried out by Flower in both instances was so definite 
an improvement on previous methods, that he deserves 
to be considered as an originator and inventor in museum- 
work. His methods have not only met with general 
approval, and their application with admiration, but they 
have been largely adopted and copied by other curators 
and directors of public museums both at home and 
abroad. In his address as President of the British 
Association, and also in an address to the Museums 
Association, Sir William Flower has explained in some 
detail the theory which he held with regard to the 
proper selection and arrangement of objects in a public 
museum. The general conception which Sir William 
Flower had formed was accepted and developed in 
detail by that gifted and genial museum-director, Brown 
Goode, of Washington, U.S. 
It is simple enough and convincing. But the work of 
the museum curator consists not merely in framing 
theories of museum organisation and arrangement: the 
more important part of his work is the putting of such 
theories into practice. To do this, energy and patience 
in the surmounting of obstacles are necessary, and 
perhaps as much as or more than any other qualitv—the 
artistic sense. Sir William Flower possessed this last 
quality in a remarkable degree. No pains were spared 
by him in selecting the proper colour for the background 
or supports of the specimens exhibited in a case, or in 
effectively spacing and balancing the objects brought 
together in one field of view. He took the greatest pains 
to make the museum under his care a delight to the eye, 
so that the visitor should be charmed by the harmony 
and fitness of the groups presented to his notice, and thus 
the more easily led to an appreciation of the scientific 
lesson which each object has to tell. There are public 
galleries in some of the natural history museums of 
Europe where the specimens are so crowded and ill- 
placed, where the lighting is so badly designed and the 
prevailing colour of case and wall so depressing, that 
the main purpose of the exhibition is defeated by the 
fact that the visitor becomes seriously attacked by head- 
ache before he has been able to ascertain what there is 
for him to look at, or why he should look at anything 
at all, in the appalling accumulation spread before him. 
It was Sir William Flower’s merit to have introduced a 
better way, and so far as opportunity and the brief four- 
teen years of his directorship allowed him to do so, he 
put that better way into practice at the national museum 
of natural history. The first great principle upon which 
Sir William Flower insisted was that the possessions of a 
great museum of natural history must be divided into two 
distinct parts—to be separately dealt with in almost 
all respects—viz. the public or show-collection, and the 
special or study-collection, not exhibited to the general 
public, but readily accessible to all investigators and 
specially qualified persons. The latter collection, he in- 
sisted, should have at least as much space devoted to it 
as the former. In this way the public galleries would 
(he showed) be cleared of the excess of specimens which, 
nevertheless, the museum must carefully preserve for the 
NO. 1550, VOL. 60] 
use of specialists. Then, further, Flower held that every 
specimen placed in the public or show-collection should 
be there in order to demonstrate to the visitor some 
definite fact or facts, and so should be moSt fully visible, 
isolated rather than obscured by neighbouring speci- 
mens, and ticketed with an easily-read label stating 
clearly and simply the reason why it is worth looking at 
—that is to say, what are its points of interest. He 
would thus have reduced very much in ”zder the speci- 
mens commonly exhibited in natural history museums, 
and have increased the zzferest and beauty of each 
specimen selected for the public eye. Another principle 
which he often insisted upon—but was not able to put 
fully into practice owing to long-standing arrangements 
in the museum over which he presided—was that in the 
public galleries the skeletons of animals should not be 
placed in one room and the stuffed skins in another, and 
the soft parts in a third, and the fossilised remains of extinct 
allied animals in a fourth more or less remote chamber ; 
but that the visitor should see, side by side, the stuffed 
or otherwise preserved animal (mammal, bird, reptile, 
fish, mollusc, insect, worm or polyp) and its skeleton 
and important parts of its internal structure and the re- 
mains of its extinct allies. Thus, there would be, not 
three or four separate zoological collections for the 
amazed visitor to traverse and bring into correlation by 
mental effort, but one only, in which the story of each 
animal is told as completely as possible in one connected 
exhibit. It is simply a fact that the “art of arranging 
museums for the public” is in its infancy, and that it 
was mainly, if not entirely (so far as natural history is 
concerned) founded by William Henry Flower. Like 
other originators, he did not live to see the principles 
which he advocated fully acted upon, nor did he expect 
to do so. He knew that time is a necessary element 
in such developments. But he has left an enduring 
mark on what we may call “museum policy.” His 
teaching and performance are producing, and will con- 
tinue to produce, progress towards the realisation of his 
ideals. 
Sir William Flower did not train or produce any 
pupils. He did his own work with his own hands, and I 
have the best reason to know that he was so deeply 
shocked and distressed by the inaccuracy which un- 
fortunately crept into some of the work of his dis- 
tinguished predecessor Owen, through the employment 
of dissectors and draftsmen whose. work he did not: 
sufficiently supervise, that he himself determined to be 
exceptionally careful and accurate in his own records 
and notes. In later years, he had the assistance of young » 
anatomists in making the beautiful preparations which 
are placed in the central hall of the museum. One of: 
his assistants, Mr. Wray, whilst preparing, under Sir 
William Flower’s direction, specimens for the museum 
to exhibit the disposition of the feathers in the wings of 
birds, discovered the strange and puzzling fact that the 
fifth cubital quill is apparently absent—that is to say, 
there is a gap where it should be—in whole orders and 
families of birds, whilst it is present in other orders and 
families. The discovery of the wide-spread occurrence 
of aquintocubitalism—as it has been called—was thus 
made in Sir William Flower’s work-room, and in con- 
nection with his scheme of museum exhibition. 
It is well to place on record that Sir William Flower 
was a convinced Darwinian. At the meeting of the 
Church Congress at Reading in October 1883, he had 
the courage to open a discussion on “ Recent Advances 
in Natural Science in their relation to the Christian 
Faith,” his expressed object being to mitigate the pre- 
judices of many of the strongest opponents of the doctrine 
of evolution amongst the clergy. 
Whilst discharging in so many different ways important 
public duties, and holding up amongst scientific men a 
high standard of accurate work and unremitting devotion 
