10 REroRT— 1889. 



yearly becoming more manifest. Museums of scientific apparatus now 

 form portions of every well-equipped educational establishment, and under 

 tbe auspices of the Science and Art Department at South Kensington a 

 national collection illustrating those branches of natural history science 

 which have escaped recognition in the British Museum is assuming a 

 magnitude and importance which brings the question of properly housing 

 and displaying it urgently to the front. 



Anomalies such as these are certain to occur in the present almost 

 infantile though rapidly progressive state of science. It may be taken for 

 granted that no scientific institution of any complexity of organisation 

 can be, except at the moment of its birth, abreast of the most modern 

 views of the subject, especially in the dividing lines between, and the pro- 

 portional representation of, the various branches of knowledge which it 

 includes. 



The necessity for subdivisions in the study of science is continually 

 becoming more apparent as the knowledge of the details of each subject 

 multiplies without corresponding increase in the power of the human 

 mind to grasp and deal with them, and the dividing lines not only become 

 sharper, but as knowledge advances they frequently require revision. It 

 might be supposed that such revision would adjust itself to the direction 

 taken by the natural development'of the relations of the different branches 

 of science, and the truer conceptions entertained of such relations. But 

 this is not always so. Artificial barriers are continually being raised to 

 keep these dividing lines in the direction in which they have once started. 

 Difficulties of readjustment arise not only from the mechanical obstacles 

 caused by the size and arrangements of the buildings and facilities 

 for the allocation of various kinds of collections, but still more from the 

 numerous personal interests which grow up and wind their meshes 

 around such institutions. Professorships and curatorships of this or 

 that division of science are founded and endowed, and their holders 

 are usually tenacious either of encroachment upon or of any wide en- 

 largement of the boundaries of the subject they have undertaken to teach 

 or to illustrate ; and in this way, more than any other, passing phases of 

 scientific knowledge have become crystallised or fossilised in institutions 

 where they might least have been expected. I may instance many Euro- 

 pean universities and great museums in which zoology and comparative 

 anatomy are still held to be distinct subjects taught by different profes- 

 sors, and where, in consequence of the division of the collections under 

 their charge, the skin of an animal, illustrating its zoology, and its skele- 

 ton and teeth, illustrating its anatomy, must be looked for in different 

 and perhaps remotely placed buildings. 



For the perpetuation of the unfortunate separation of palaeontology 

 from biology, which is so clearly a survival of an ancient condition 

 of scientific culture, and for the maintenance in its integi'ity of the 

 heterogeneous compound of sciences which we now call ' geology,' 



