Ill 



MUSEUMS AND RESEAUCH 



Museums are of many kinds and they serve many purposes ; 

 but all have one common object, the preservation of material 

 for education and research. 



When Professor Dendy invited me to give this lecture — 

 one of a series designed to emphasise the national importance 

 of Zoology — ^he suggested that I might take as my subject the 

 educational value of museums ; but it seemed to me that at 

 the present day the educational value of museums is appreci- 

 ated to a much greater extent than the fact that museums are 

 — or ought to be — centres of research, and that in a museum 

 of Natural History research may be more important than 

 education. 



Certainly one of the purposes of a zoological museum is to 

 arrange, display and label series of animals in such a way as to 

 interest visitors and give them a general idea of the animal 

 world ; moreover, these exhibits should be sufficiently complete 

 to be of value to zoological students and to other visitors in 

 search of information, whilst special exhibitions may illustrate 

 the relation of zoology to the intellectual life and material 

 welfare of the nation. But another of the principal objects 

 of a zoological museum should be to amass collections of 

 animals, not for exhibition to the pubUe, but for scientific 

 study. In an ideal museum every species would be repre- 

 sented by a series of examples illustrating its geographical 

 range, variation, growth, seasonal changes, sexual characters 

 etc., and all these specimens would be properly preserved, 

 correctly named, labelled, catalogued and arranged in 

 systematic order according to their natural relationships. 



