680 



SCIENCE, 



[N. S. Vol. V. No. 122: 



ing them in his museum, from time im- 

 memorial man has tried to imprison the 

 things of nature in a fixed system, a fixed 

 classification, which is not the whole of 

 science, and which cannot be the nest of the 

 whole of philosophy. Nature, in her vast- 

 ness, protests against the classifiers ; mad- 

 dened, indignant, despairing, she revolts 

 against routine." What rubbish ! How 

 can the curator at £70 a year be expected 

 to have ideas of this kind ? And how as- 

 suming that he has found the intelligence, 

 how can he spare the time to put them into 

 operation? And what would our Boards 

 of Governors, our Trustees, our Town Coun- 

 cils, say if they went into a museum and 

 found a curator, instead of mounting speci- 

 mens by the hundred, and making as large 

 a display as possible, calmly sitting at his 

 table reading the ' Origin of Species,' or the 

 latest number of the Archiv fur Entioiche- 

 lungs-ilechanik f 



Apropos of the curator, he has been de- 

 scribed, and very rightly, as the soul of the 

 museum. "What kind of a soul does the 

 museum want? It is obvious that the 

 curator should not be a scientific man ; for 

 if he be he will constantly be led astray 

 from his work of labelling, ticketing, mount- 

 ing, and so forth, to investigate the rela- 

 tionships, distribution, and what not, of 

 some new species that has come into his 

 hands; or, in tracing out some peculiar 

 facts of anatomical or historical interest, he 

 will waste the time that should be employed 

 in compiling a list either of specimens fig- 

 ured by others or of his own grievances. 

 The function of a curator is to keep his 

 specimens clean, to keep them in order, and 

 to exhibit them in such manner as will 

 satisfy the annual visitation of his Board of 

 Trustees or his Town Council. The 

 motto that the curator should hold before 

 his eyes is that famous one, ' Surtout point 

 de zele.' It is not for him to add to the 

 stores of the museum by spending his Sun- 



days in the country collecting fresh speci- 

 mens, or his holidays in foreign lands tO' 

 verify the localities whence specimens have 

 come. It is not long since a paper was 

 read before this very Association, read, I 

 regret to say, by a person for whom I am 

 in some respects responsible, recommending 

 that the museum assistant should be sent 

 out " to collect in the fields, the rocks and 

 the seas," then that he should " study the 

 specimens that he has collected, each of 

 which will have for him an interest and a 

 living history which under present condi- 

 tions it never has ; by their means he will 

 extend the boundaries of knowledge and 

 confirm the foundations of system, so that 

 it is for him an expression of universal 

 thought, and no longer a mechanical de- 

 vice for sorting species into their places. 

 Then, with this vitalized classification, and 

 with some real meaning in his head, he will 

 proceed to prepare his most instructive 

 specimens for exhibition, so that the final 

 result may convey to others something at 

 least of the beauty he himself has found in 

 the world." — So too, at the beginning of the 

 century, P. A. Latreille wrote in Sonnini's 

 edition of Buffon (' Insectes,' I., p. x.) 

 '' L'homme, qui n'etudie les Insectes que 

 dans son cabinet, pent etre descripteur; 

 mais il ne sera jamais, a ce que je pense, 

 un profound entomologiste." But the cura- 

 tor does not require to be ' un profond 

 entomologiste,' ' un profond geologiste,' ' un 

 profond biologiste,' or anything that re- 

 motely resembles a scientific man. The 

 curator should take for his pattern and 

 exemplar the clerk in a dry-goods store. 



We turn now to a certain practical detail 

 in the arrangement of our museums, which 

 fortunately seems to commend itself to the 

 outside public who are not scientific people, 

 and especially to the donors of specimens 

 and bequeathers of collections. I mean 

 this idea of keeping certain collections 

 separate according as they happen to have 



