July 5, 1877] 



NATURE 



^83 



Museum Reform 



No one acquainted with the condition of the greater proportion 

 of our provincial nuiseums can do otherwise than confess with 

 sorrow that much of what is alleged against them in the paper 

 of Mr. Boyd Dawkins is too true. While fully concurring in all 

 he says as to the actual state of matters in these amorphous 

 receptacles of curiosities and conceits, and as to the crying need 

 for reform, you will perhaps allow me to mahe a few comments 

 as to the causes which contribute to ketp museum collections in 

 their present disreputable condition, and the means by which 

 they may be worthily organised, and raised to their high and 

 proper position among the educational agencies of the country. 



It is necessary in the first p?ace to accept Mr. Boyd Dawkiris's 

 glorification of the collecting instinct with some modification or 

 rather amplification of its scope. A man is indeed "poor and 

 much to be pitied " who is not a collector in some sense ; but it 

 does not require demonstration that many of the best and greatest 

 benefactors of mankind are not collectors in a way that contri- 

 butes to the building up of museum--^. Statesmen, soldiers, 

 poets, philosophers, and orators are not of necessity poor and 

 much to be pitied because they may not devote their leisure to 

 the collection of coleoptera nor find solace in the beauties of 

 Lucca della Robbia. In nine cases out of ten, indeed, the col- 

 lector is a person of one idea, and that idea is that the gathering, 

 labelling, and arranging of the objects of his fancy is the beginning, 

 end, and sum of science. He is generally an estimable person ; 

 but as regards scientific culture he is quite as well employed in 

 collecting spoiled postage stamps as he would be in gathering 

 together the species of any of the great divisions of the animal 

 kingdom. When we come to the tenth man — the intellectual 

 collector — we find a really scientific worker, but one necessarily 

 confining himself to a limited field. He is in short a man with 

 a hobby, or, to put it more courteously, a specialist. Put a man 

 of this select class in charge of a provincial museum, and wliile 

 probably he is too wise to speak slightirgly of any department 

 of human knowledge, he will mevitably develop his own special 

 subject at the expense of all others. A geologist draws towards 

 him rocks and fossils, an entomologist collects in the particular 

 group of insects to which he has given attention, and an archioo- 

 logist looks only or mainly for antiquities. If the man is a simple 

 collector of the ordinary type he know's nothing or despises every- 

 thing beyond his region, and hence in part the jumble of ethnology, 

 art, ami science which Mr. Bo)d Dawkins so graphically 

 desciibes. 



A specialist, though an indispensable cultivator of science, is 

 a very bad museum curator. A curator should be like a news- 

 paper editor, a man of general knowledge and culture. Unlike 

 an editor, he should belong to no party, but be possessed of 

 catholic sympathies in science and art ; teady to accept and use 

 the assistance of specialists, in a way that will subordinate all 

 departments to one harmonious general plan. Further, he should 

 possess an experimental knowledge of the routine duties of a 

 museum, such as can only be obtained by a training or apprentice- 

 ship in a well-organised museum. 



No provision, I need hardly say, exists at the present time for 

 training young men to museum woik, and there is no pecuniary 

 inducement held out for lads to seek curatoiial qualifications. 

 The tra'ning obtained in the great metropolitan museums is 

 special ; and in the government service there is no hiving olT of 

 apprentice^. Municipal and free li!.iary authorities have not 

 )et learnt that a well-equipped museum is an expensive institu- 

 tion, and though many corporation dignitaries may spend^annually 

 1,000/. and upwcrds on purchases for their private collections, it 

 does not occur to them that it is necessary to do more than open 

 the doors of a public museum or art gallery, and allow collec- 

 tions to accumulate, arrange, classify, catalogue, and conserve 

 very much of their own accord. And so we obtain the dusty, 

 misleading, higgeldy-piggeldies which do duty in provincial 

 towns as " museums." 



Before these institutions can rise from their present dismal 

 estate it is essential that much more money be devoted to them. 

 Of course it does not matter whence the funds come — from 

 public rates or private benefaction — provided it comes honestly ; 

 but there is, as the law now stands, hardly in any town suf- 

 ficient rating power to build and maintain a museum adequate 

 to the population and wants of the locality. Free library boards 

 with their penny rating limit have in many instances committed 

 themselves to very ambitious mistakes by instituting numerous 

 district libraries, and throwing in a public museum to the bar- 

 gain, under the delusion either that their penny is like the 



vpizard's inexhaustible bottle, or that these institutions will 

 live and flourish "without visible means of support." The 

 result is, that while libraries have been crippled and half starved, 

 ratepayers have been justly disgusted with the very name of 

 museum. 



The provincial public mind, both official and extra-ofiicial, 

 stands sorely in need of enlightenment as to the nature and 

 functions of a museum. The education of opinion on these 

 points is the first step required for the elevation of local 

 museums. With that eflected, enlarged rating power, a demand 

 for competent men, and adequate support to institutions on a 

 broad educational basis would soon follow. Local museums, 

 ceasing to be mere curiosity-shops, receptacles of "relics from 

 Sedan," "water from the Jordan," with six-legged cats and 

 similar monstrosities, would become storehouses of well-selected 

 information and material for the use of teachers and investiga- 

 tors, as well as instructive and elevating resorts of the general 

 public. 



No class of institutions existing could be made mutually more 

 helpful than museums. Duplicates innumerable go to wreck 

 and dtstruction in the stores and cellars of almost every museum, 

 while certainly many kindred institutions stand in need of what 

 is simply an encumbrance to some. Similarly with labels and 

 stores of information, each institution at present stands apart, 

 working painfully, and perhaps erringly, at tasks which might 

 well be spared, seeing that it is and has been done over and 

 over again in other institutions. Again, one locality possesses 

 rare and unusual facilities for obtaining particular classes of ob- 

 jects, and that advantage can,;by a system of exchange ,be made 

 properly beneficial to its own museum by drawing what it needs 

 from other.=. Further, in these days of comparative infancy, 

 the experience of the ofificers of the older museums would be of 

 unspeakable value to tho;e struggling amid difficulties of which 

 they barely recognise the nature ; and to all, the countenance of 

 the great institutions — which should be prepared to stand more 

 ill loco pariittis than they at present do — and the advice and 

 help of their specialists would be of much advantage. In these 

 days of conferences, associations, and unions, it is manifest that 

 there is room for a conference of museum keepers, and no one 

 can doubt that vast go .' v. ould result from drawing the officers 

 of museums of all kinds into cl<^ser relationship with each other. 

 Will the energetic cfiiceis of South Kensington not display once 

 more their organising talent by bringing together such a con- 

 ference, which, it may be hoped, would result in a peimanent 

 union among museum ofticers. J. P. 



Taunton College School 



May I ask the insertion of the following brief remarks : — 



The writer of the article in your paper of the 2Sth on Taunton 

 College School is urder some strange misapprehension, which 

 perhaps may account for his unfavourable criticism oi the schemes 

 of the Endowed Schools' Commission. He clearly implies, 

 though he does not positively state, that the present distutbance 

 at Taunton (of which I know nothing) and the scandal at 

 Felsted two or three years ago are in some way attributable to 

 the wrong constitution of the governing body, under schemes of 

 the Endowed Schools' Commission. 



Taunton College School is not under a scheme of the Endowed 

 Schools' Commission, and no scheme was ever proposed for it 

 by that body. A scheme for Felsted Grammar School was pro- 

 posed by the Endowed Schools' Commission, with the hearty 

 goodwill of the late master, but was rejected by the House of 

 Lords on the motion of the Bishop of Rocliester (now of St. 

 Alban'i). The trustees who dismissed Dr. Grignun were the 

 very body whose constitution our scheme proposed largely to 

 modify, and who were in consequence not a lit'le anno)ed. 



Your writer will, I hope, excuse my saying that he will serve 

 the cause of science and of schools much beiter if he does not 

 weaken his attacks on the guilty by hitting, or making feints of 

 hitting, at the innocent. Henry J. Roby, 



Late one of the Endowed Schools' 



Manchester, June 29 Commissioners 



Hog Wallows 



I HAVE been watching with some interest the progress of the 



discussion on the "Hog Wallows" of California, which has 



been in progress in your papier during nearly all of this year. 



When a member of the California Geological Suivey Corps, 1 



