too Journal and proceedings. 



be found to be as true of them. • I may therefore safely say that 

 societies for the study of natural history are the growth of our own 

 age, and I think a sign of its intellectual advance. 



I must, however, remember that it is not of our society gener- 

 ally that I have to speak to-night, but of one of the methods by 

 which it proposes to carry on the practical study of natural science 

 by the formation of a museum, or more especially as to the value of 

 our museum as a means of education. 



Of the general value of museums — using the word in its widest 

 sense as collections of works of art and of nature — in the intellectual 

 advance of mankind, there can be no question. How could art 

 make any progress, how could it even exist, if its productions were 

 destroyed as soon as they were created, if there were no museums, 

 public or private, in which they could be preserved and made avail- 

 able to mankind now and hereafter ? How could science be studied 

 without ready access to the materials upon which knowledge is built 

 up ? In many branches of science, especially those called natural 

 history, the progress was mainly commensurate with the abundance 

 and accessibility of such material. Though the first duty of mu- 

 seums was without qliestion to preserve the materials upon which 

 the history of mankind and knowledge was based, I have noticed in 

 the numerous succession of essays, addresses, lectures and papers, 

 constituting what I may be permitted to call the museum literature 

 of the last twenty or thirty years, the gradual development of the 

 conception that the museum of the future is to have for its complete 

 ideal not only the simple preservation of the objects contained in it, 

 but above all, their arrangement in such a manner as to provide for 

 the instruction of those who visit it. In other words, the value of 

 the museum will be tested not only by its contents but by the treat- 

 ment of those contents as means of advancing knowledge. 



I suppose the first recorded institution which bore the name 

 museum, meaning a temple or haunt of the muse, was that founded 

 by Ptolemy Soter at Alexandria about 300 B. C, an excellent paper 

 on which was read before this Association several years ago by Mr. 

 Glyndon. But that was not a museum in our sense of the word, but 

 rather in accordance with its etymology, a place appropriated to the 

 cultivation of learning, or which was frequented by a society or 

 academy of learned men, devoting themselves to philosophical 

 studies and the pursuit of knowledge. 



