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TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 



2. The Place of Museums in General Education. 

 By Hon. Professor W. Boyd Dawkins, M.A., D.Sc, F.R.S. 



The value of museums in general education depends upon their arrangement 

 and their being classified so as to show the true relations of the various objects 

 to one another. I propose to lay before the Section a scheme of classification 

 based on my experience in Manchester, dating from 1869, in combining various 

 scattered collections into one museum, which is now of equal service to the 

 University, to the various schools and institutions of the district, and to the 

 general public. What has been done here on a fairly large may be done 

 with equal success on a small scale elsewhere. 



The difficulty of co-ordinating the widely different groups of objects of 

 human interest has been overcome by the adoption of the principles of time 

 and evolution as the basis of classification, as seen in the following scheme. 



Scheme of Classification carried out in the Manchester Museum. 



In this scheme the minerals are phiced at the bottom because they are the 

 materials forming the rocks. The existing animals and plants stand at the top 

 in their true relation to the geological record, and the various changes, which 

 they have undergone in becoming what they are, fix the geological age of the 

 rocks in which they lie. 



The place also of the collections illustrating History, Anthropology, and 

 other subjects grouped together in No. VIII., in close relation with those of 

 Zoology, Botany (VI., VII.), and Geology (I. to V.), is fully justified by the 

 connection between those sciences, and more particularly by the appearance 

 of man in the geological record. The continuity is so marked that the present 

 face of nature may be taken to be the current, but not necessarily the last, of 

 the stages of the evolution of life in the Tertiary Period. 



A museum arranged on these lines, made intelligible by lectures and 

 addresses as in Manchester, cannot fail to become an important instrument 

 elsewhere in a system of education in which the study of things is becoming 

 at least as important as the study of books. It is now doing its work in 

 Manchester. 



