ADDRESS. 



specimens, and the art of preparing them attained a high degree of 

 excellence at Padua and Bologna two centuries ago. But these were 

 generally the private property of the professors, as were nearly all the 

 collections used to illustrate the teaching of anatomy and pathology in 

 our country within the memory of many now living. 



Notwithstanding the multiplication of public museums during the 

 present century, and the greater resources and advantages which many 

 of these possess, which private collectors cannot command, the spirit of 

 accumulation in iadividuals has happily not passed away, although 

 usually directed into rather different channels than formerly. The 

 general museums or miscellaneous collections of old are now left to 

 governments and institutions which afford gi-eater guarantee of their 

 permanence and public utility, while admirable service is done to science 

 by those private persons with leisure and means who, devoting them- 

 selves to some special subject, amass the materials by which its study 

 can be pursued in detail either by themselves or by those they know to be 

 qualified to do so ; which collections, if they fulfil their most appropriate 

 destiny, ultimately become incorporated, by gift or purchase, in one or 

 other of the public museums, and then serve as permanent factors in 

 the education of the nation, or rather of the world. 



It would be passing beyond the limits of time allotted to this 

 address, indeed going beyond the scope of the Association, if I were to 

 speak of many of the subjects which have pre-eminently exercised the 

 faculties of the collector and formed the materials of which museums are 

 constructed. The various methods by which the mind of man has been 

 able to reproduce the forms of natural objects or to give expression to 

 the images created by his own fancy, from the rudest scratchings of a 

 savage on a bone, or the simplest arrangement of lines employed in 

 ornamenting the roughest piece of pottery, up to the most lovely com- 

 binations of form and colour hitherto attained in sculpture or in painting, 

 or in works in metal or in clay, depend altogether on museums for their 

 preservation, for our knowledge of their condition and history in the past, 

 and for the lessons which they can convey for the future. 



Apart from the delight which the contemplation of the noblest ex- 

 pressions of art must produce in all cultivated minds, apart also from the 

 curiosity and interest that must be excited by all the less successfully exe- 

 cuted attempts to produce similar results, as materials for constructing 

 the true history of the life of man, at different stages of civilisation, in 

 different circumstances of living, and in divers regions of the earth, such 

 collections are absolutely invaluable. 



But I must pass them by in order to dwell more in detail upon those 

 which specially concern the advancement of the subjects which come 

 under the notice of this Association — museums devoted to the so-called 

 ' natural history ' sciences, although much which will be said of them 

 will doubtless be more or less applicable to museums in general. 



