14 ON MUSEUMS, &c., 



The Oxford Museum (the New Museum, as it is there called) is 

 <3ontained in a range of buildings 236 feet in length, of the style of the 

 13th century, and situated in a large airy park. The Canadian is at 

 once struck by a certain resemblance which it bears to University 

 College, Toronto. In the interior of its central part is a fine quad- 

 rangle, a perfect square, each of the sides 76 feet in length. This 

 quadrangle is roofed over with glass. Around this square is a series of 

 rooms, four of them fitted up for lectures, with flights of seats descend- 

 ing down to a table for the lecturer. One of the lecture-rooms is for 

 chemistry, another is for experimental philosophy, another is for mine- 

 ralogy and geology, and the fourth is for medicine. The other rooms 

 are Professors' work-rooms, store-rooms, sitting-rooms, apparatus-rooms 

 and laboratories ; in the anatomical part of the building I observed a 

 Macerating-room ; to the chemical portion of the building there are 

 attached balance-rooms. Almost detached outside, at one corner is the 

 principal laboratory, a reproduction of the Abbot's Kitchen at Grlaston- 

 bury. This almost separate building, circular, with conical roof, helps 

 the general resemblance to the Toronto University building, although 

 its position is towards the right and not towards the left. The circular 

 laboratory at the Toronto University is, by the way, not a reproduction 

 of the Abbot's Kitchen at Glastonbury ; but, less appropriately, of the 

 Round Church at Cambridge, commonly called St. Sepulchre's, built 

 after the pattern of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. 

 Round the whole of the interior quadrangle of the Museum at Oxford 

 runs a corridor or arcade sustaining a gallery or upper corridor. Double 

 rows of slender metal columns sustain the lofty glass roof. On the 

 left as you enter are the anatomical and physiological collections ; oa 

 the right the mineralogical collections. In the middle, on each side of 

 the central passage, are zoological collections. Along the side opposite 

 to the entrance are palseontological collections. 



Round three sides of the upper corridor are also rooms as below : the 

 whole of the front side is taken up with a library and reading room, 

 the latter containing the more recent books, the scientific transactions 

 and periodicals. On the left is a very spacious general lecture room ; 

 also an anatomical lecture room, with professor's and students' sitting- 

 rooms. On the right is another lecture room, and rooms for an 

 astronomy professor and a geometry professor. There is also up here 

 an entomological museum with a curator's room. 



