ADDRESS. Xevii 
The most elaborate and beautiful of created things—those manifesting 
life—have much to teach—much that comes home to the business of man, 
and also to the highest elements of his moral nature. The nation that 
gathers together thousands of corals, shells, insects, fishes, birds, and beasts, 
and votes the requisite funds for preparing, preserving, housing and arran- 
ging them, derives the smallest possible return for the outlay by merely gazing 
and wondering at the manifold variety and strangeness of such specimens of 
Natural History. 
The simplest coral and the meanest insect may have something in its 
history worth knowing, and in some way profitable. Every organism is a 
character in which Divine wisdom is written, and which ought to be 
expounded. Our present system of opening the book of Nature to the 
masses, as in the Galleries of the British Museum, without any provision for 
expounding her language, is akin to that which keeps the book of God sealed 
to the multitude in a dead tongue. 
Finally, in reference to a National Museum of Natural History, I would 
respectfully solicit the attention of the Administrator to the successful 
working and unprecedented progress of the National Botanical Esta- 
blishment at Kew, of the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn Street, 
and of the Museum of Practical Art at South Kensington, in reference to 
the relations of the eminent Directors of those establishments to Govern- 
ment. For this opens the question, whether in the event of acquiring, in 
whatever locality, the element essential to a National Museum of Natural 
History—space—any intermediate organization, unknown in the public esta- 
blishments above cited, be really needed in the case of Natural History, in 
order to afford Parliament and the public the requisite guarantee of the 
_ good condition of the Collections, and the efficient discharge of the duties 
and functions of the National Museum of Natural History. 
The sciences promoted by the statistical Section F., although bearing more 
immediately than any others on the prosperity of nations and the well-being 
of mankind, had no existence in the time of Bacon. 
We look in vain for any evidence, for example, of a clear conception of 
Sanitary Science, or the doctrines preventive of disease, in the writings of 
_ that great philosopher and politician. The only approach to Statistics which 
we find in the ‘ Historia Vite et Mortis,’ for example, is a collection of in- 
Stances of longevity; and the main aim of that Essay seems to have been the 
extreme prolongation of particular or individual life, not the insurance of 
average longevity to the species. Some remarks on the advantage of pure 
air are congenial with the aims of the modern sanitary philosopher; but he 
finds no evidence of Bacon’s conception’ of its importance to the masses, 
or of the means of ensuring it to populous cities, for prevention of plague 
and pestilence. Sanitary science, as a great power for mankind, in the 
Baconian sense, is of very recent growth: and, whether we consider the pre- 
Sent evidence of its potency where it has been rightly applied, or the present 
1858. g 
