50 Possibilities of Societies. 



and greatly g-Ifted African explorer, Mr Joseph Thomson, who 

 did honour to our country and was cut down in the midst of 

 an eminent career, assured me that he owed his introduction 

 to his life work and his success in it to the teachings of a 

 member of this Society, the late Dr Grierson, of Thornhill, 

 and his Museum. If this Society can give us half a dozen 

 more Joseph Thomsons, it will deserve well of the country. 

 Well, Dr Grierson 's Museum brings me to the last of the 

 future possibilities of this Society, which I wish to put before 

 it this evening, and that is the establishment of a really good 

 Museum in the town. I wish to speak with great respect of 

 the Observatory — I always take my friends there ; it has a 

 splendid situation, and it contains some rare, and interesting, 

 and valuable deposits, but it is not a museum in any true 

 sense of the word, and has an air of faded decadence about 

 it that is depressing. The essence of a museum consists not 

 in the building, the cabinets, the cases, the specimens, the 

 labels, needful though these be, but in the curator, who gives 

 life to the dry bones ; and I hope the time will come when you 

 will have a well-paid scientific curator at the head of a 

 genuinely educational and well-assorted museum under the 

 control of this Society, primarily illustrating the antiquities 

 and the geology, botany, and zoology of the district, but con- 

 taining well selected groups of objects connected with science 

 generally and with art and industry. " A museum,"- said 

 Ruskin, " is no less useful to a town than its churches, circula- 

 ting libraries, and gasometers. It is a place of noble and 

 ennobling instruction, where persons who have a mind to use 

 it may obtain relief from labour, a true training of the eye, an 

 appreciation of what is good and lovely in nature, and some 

 scraps of wisdom." The St. George's Museum at Sheffield, 

 which Ruskin founded, and which is now visited by upwards 

 of 40,000 persons annually, and is an attraction to the city 

 although almost exclusively artistic and not free from fantasti- 

 cal elements, affords noteworthy hints to other museums. It 

 is not overloaded, for, as Ruskin said, one can no more see 

 twenty stones worth seeing in an hour than one can read 

 twenty books worth reading in a day. Judicious selection is 

 practised, certain ordered groups of objects are exhibited from 

 time to time, so that more careful examination may be given 



