ADDRESS. 9 



only man's physical structure : it includes his mental development, his 

 manners, customs, traditions, and languages. The illustrations of his 

 works of art, domestic utensils, and weapons of war are essential parts of 

 its study. In fact it is impossible to say where it ends. It includes all 

 that man is or ever has been, all that he has ever done. No definite line 

 can be drawn between the rudest flint weapon and the most exqiaisitely 

 finished instrument of destruction which has ever been turned out from 

 the manufactory at Elswick, between the rough representation of a 

 mammoth, carved by one of its contemporary men on a portion of its 

 own tusk, and tlie most admirable production of a Landscer. An 

 anthi'opological collection, to be logical, must include all that is in not 

 only the old British Museum but the South Kensington Museum and 

 the National Gallery. The notion of an anthropology which considers 

 savages and pre-histnric people as apart from the rest of mankind may, 

 in the, limitations of human powers, have certain conveniences, but it is 

 utterly unscientific and loses sight of the great value of the study in 

 tracing the gradual growth of our complex systems and customs from the 

 primitive ways of our progenitors. 



On the other hand, the division first indicated is as perfectly defi- 

 nite, logical, and scientific as any such division can be. That there are 

 many inconveniences attending wide local disjunctions of the collections 

 containing subjects so distinct yet so nearly allied as physical and psychical 

 anthropology must be fully admitted; but these could only have been 

 overcome by embracing in one grand institution the various national col- 

 lections illustrating the different branches of science and art, placed in 

 such order and juxtaposition that their mutual relations might be apparent, 

 and the resources of each might be brought to bear upon the elucidation 

 of all the others — an ideal institution, such as the world has not yet seen, 

 but into which the old British Museum might at one time have been 

 developed. 



A purely ' Natural History Museum. ' will then embrace a collection 

 of objects illustrating the natural productions of the earth, and in its 

 ■widest and truest sense should include, as far as they can be illustrated by 

 museum specimens, all the sciences which deal with natural phenomena. 

 It has only been the difficulties, real or imaginary, in illustrating them 

 which have excluded such subjects as astronomy, physics, chemistry, and 

 physiology from occupying departments in our National Natural History 

 Museum, while allowing the introduction of their sister sciences, minora- 

 logy, geology, botany, and zoology. 



Though the experimental sciences and those which deal with the laws 

 which govern the universe, rather than with the materials of which it ia 

 composed, have not hitherto greatly called forth the collector's instinct, or 

 depended upon museums for their illustration, yet the great advantages 

 of collections of the various instruments by means of which these sciences 

 are pursued, and of examples of the methods by which they are taught, are 



