Apkil 30, 1897.] 



SCIENCE. 



679 



book writers, to foist upon the public senile 

 illustrations that are nothing better than 

 caricatures, still we can always excuse an 

 effete arrangement or an obsolete nomen- 

 clature on the plea that we cannot possibly 

 find the time or the money to re-arrange 

 or re-name the specimens. We can, with 

 much show of justice, refuse to give con- 

 crete form to the philosophic ideas of our 

 greatest thinkers. AVe can refuse to allow 

 our si^ecimens to be experimented with, 

 and arranged this way or that way accord- 

 ing as a systematist may desire to check 

 the working-out of his system. 



Allied to the natural conservatism of 

 museums is another eiiicacious practice. It 

 is a well-known story that in the good old 

 days of zoology, when species were regarded 

 as separate creations, a profane sceptic ven- 

 tured to ask one of our greatest zoologists 

 what he really did manage to do with the 

 connecting links. After looking carefully 

 round the room, the zoologist whispered in 

 reply, " My dear sir, I throw them out of 

 the window." It is these window speci- 

 mens that form the basis of our theories of 

 evolution. It is by their means alone that we 

 can work out the numerous problems that 

 are pressing on us to-day — the problems of 

 geographical distribution, the problems of 

 heredity and growth, all the vast problems 

 of the origin of our groups of animals. It 

 is these window specimens that the mu- 

 seum curator always has suppressed with a 

 stern hand; may he long continue to do so ! 

 How absurd it would be to expect other- 

 wise ! Under what names should we enter 

 them in our registers ? How could we 

 place them in our cases? Where, indeed, 

 should we find the room for the thousands 

 of variations from the central types that 

 are to be met with in all parts of the world ? 

 A museum, being finite, must select more 

 or less, and if we select only those speci- 

 mens that agree with the diagnoses of 

 authors, we shall be saving both ourselves 



and the authors a vast amount of trouble. 

 With regard to the numerous details valued 

 by that exacting creature, the modern biol- 

 ogist — details of locality, of season, or, in 

 the case of fossils, of the definite zonal 

 horizon — it is hardly necessary to add that 

 their accumulation would involve the cura- 

 tor in enormous labor, and if indulged in 

 would probably lead him to the collection 

 of an absurd number of specimens. 



All that I have yet said may be summed 

 up in the one phrase ' Shun ideas !' Would 

 it be believed that a certain Professor Her- 

 rera, of the National Museum of Mexico, 

 has recentlj' produced a paper in which he 

 says that the museum of the future is to be 

 a museum of ideas? "There will be no 

 gallery of birds, or of mammals, or of fishes, 

 or of reptiles ; no collection of Coleoptera, 

 no collection of Chiroptera or of pheasants, 

 or of pigeons. Museums of the future do 

 not classify by classes, families, tribes, 

 genera, species, sub-species, varieties, sub- 

 varieties, races and sub-races ; they put in 

 order facts and classify ideas. There are 

 rooms for heredity, for ontogenesis, coeno- 

 genesis, variation, mimicry, the struggle for 

 life, nutrition, and so on. These rooms are 

 arranged in a philosophical order, and in 

 that order they must be visited by the 

 public; to this end there will be barriers 

 suitably disposed. In the museum of the 

 future the specimen is the lacquey of an 

 idea ; whereas, in our present museums, 

 ideas are the slaves of specimens. Thus a 

 specimen is not exhibited because it is rare 

 or because it ought to be exhibited; we 

 show the most profound contempt for speci- 

 mens that are rare, curious or pretty. The 

 museum of the future aims at being, not a 

 magazine of dead lumber eaten by worms, 

 but an open book in which men can read 

 the philosophy of nature." And, after sug- 

 gesting some ideas that may be exemplified 

 in museums, our author concludes, "but, 

 instead of studying these ideas and exhibit- 



