ADDRESS. 



11 



the faulty organisation of our museums is in a great measure responsible. 

 The more their rearrangement can be made to overstep and break down 

 the abrupt line of demarcation which is still almost universally drawn 

 between beings which live now and those which have lived in past times, 

 so deeply rooted in the popular miad and so hard to eradicate even from 

 that of the scientific student, the better it will be for the progress of 

 sound biological knowledge. 



But it is not of the removal of such great anomalies and incon- 

 sistencies which, Avhen they have once grown up, require heroic methods 

 to set them right, but rather of certain minor defects in the organisation 

 of almost all "existing museums which are well within the capacity of 

 comparatively modest administrative means to remedy, that I have now 



to speak. 



That great improvements have been lately effected in many respects 

 in some of the museums in this country, on the Continent, and especially 

 in America, no one can deny. The subject, as I have already indicated, 

 is, happily, exciting the attention of those who have the direction of 

 them, and even awakening interest in the mind of the general public. It 

 is in the hope of in some measure helping on or guiding this movement 

 that I have ventured on the remarks which follow. 



The first consideration in establishing a museum, large or small, 

 either in a town, institution, society, or school, is that it sbould have 

 some definite object or purpose to fulfil ; and the next is that means should 

 be forthcoming not only to establish but also to maintain the museum in 

 a suitable manner to fulfil that purpose. Some persons are enthusiastic 

 enough to think that a museum is in itself so good an object that they 

 have only to provide a building and cases and a certain number of speci- 

 mens, no matter exactly what, to fill them and then the thing is done ; 

 whereas the truth is the work has only then began. What a museum really 

 depends upon for its success and usefulness is not its building, not its 

 cases, not even its specimens, but its curator. He and his staff are the life 

 and soul of the institution, upon whom its whole value depends ; and yet in 

 many— I may say most of our museums— they are the last to be thought of. 

 The care, the preservation, the naming of the specimens are either left to 

 voluntary effort— excellent often for special collections and for a limited 

 time, but never to be depended on as a permanent arrangement— or a 

 grievously undersalaried and consequently uneducated official is expected 

 to keep in order, to clean, dust, arrange, name, and display in a manner 

 which will contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge, col- 

 lections ranging in extent over almost every branch of buman learnmg, 

 from the contents of an ancient British barrow to the last discovered 

 bird of paradise from New Guinea. 



Valuable specimens not unfrequently find their way into museums thus 

 managed. Their piiblic-spirited owners fondly imagine that they will 

 be preserved and made of use to the world if once given to such an 



