X THE HANCOCK MUSEUM AND ITS HISTORY 



chief authority of his day on the local butterflies and moths. 

 He was a brother of William Wailes, the celebrated artist in 

 stained glass. 



It has already been mentioned that Bewick made use of 

 some of the birds in the old collection. His connexion with 

 the museum seems to have extended over a considerable 

 period. He at least corresponded with Marmaduke Tunstall; 

 he used to visit George Allan, at Darlington, in order to make 

 drawings of the specimens ; and he continued to use them in 

 the same way after they came to Newcastle. A group of the 

 old "Allan Museum" birds, together with Bewick's figures of 

 them, are now shown on the " Bewick Gallery " in the 

 museum ; they were probably thought satisfactory when they 

 were stuffed, more than a hundred years ago, but to us now 

 they look very distorted, and even in Bewick's woodcuts they 

 have undergone much "editing." 



The middle period in the history of the Society and its 

 museum, from about 1840 to 1880, was one in which a great 

 amount of solid work was done and recorded, and in which 

 the museum collections increased till they had quite outgrown 

 the space available for them in the Westgate Road premises. 

 Some of the principal contents of the museum in its early days 

 have already been mentioned incidentally. During these forty 

 years the collections in all departments were gradually grow- 

 ing, partly through the continual small acquisitions which are 

 normal to the life of a museum, and partly also through 

 occasional larger and more important gifts. In 1837, for 

 example, the Earl of Tankerville presented a beautiful 

 collection of corals (and it may be mentioned that these have 

 recently been cleaned and re-installed on a new system, so 

 that they are now seen better than they have ever been before). 

 The Emperor Nicholas I. of Russia was induced, in 1838, 

 through the good offices of Lord Durham, to send to the 

 Society a representative series of the minerals of the Russian 

 Empire ; Hutton's excellent collection of minerals was pur- 

 chased for the museum by Sir William Armstrong in 1859; 

 and when subsequently, in 1872, there was added to these the 



