132 SIR WILLIAM FLOWER chap. 



building ultimately raised, though Sir William 

 Flower used it not to show types of animals, but 

 to illustrate the working of the leading laws of 

 evolution, a change from the concrete to the abstract, 

 and from mere facts to the expression of law in 

 facts, which must be admitted to mark a higher 

 ideal. But to return to Owen's conception of what 

 the Museum should have been. Besides the hall, 

 he proposed that it should contain a lecture 

 theatre, to teach orally, a large gallery for physical 

 ethnology, by which he meant a complete series of 

 coloured casts of all races of men — an idea which 

 suggests that Owen would like to have had them 

 stuffed if it were permissible, and another large 

 gallery for the whales and great Cetacea, which, as 

 he justly said, could only be exhibited in a National 

 Museum on account of their size. 



But his most advanced proposal was one for 

 showing the series of nature complete in time by 

 abolishing the artificial distinction between living 

 and extinct animals. The history and forms of 

 neither can logically be studied apart. The separa- 

 tion into zoology and palaeontology is purely arbitrary. 

 Owen had once proposed that the series should be 

 completely intermixed.^ His modified suggestion, 

 due probably to the separation of the staff into 

 departments, was to make the galleries in which 

 the specimens were exhibited adjacent or continuous. 

 The whole conception was novel and striking. 



1 See page 73. 



