66 ANIMAL LIFE AND HUMAN PROGRESS 



No such museum exists or ever will exist ; but the Natural 

 History Museum at South Kensington probably comes nearer 

 to this ideal than any other in the world. To give some idea 

 of the size of the collections, and at the same time of their 

 incompleteness, I may say that the collection of Fishes, for 

 which I am responsible, numbers more than 100,000 specimens, 

 representing perhaps about 13,000 out of some 20,000 known 

 species. The collection of Fishes is preserved in spirit and is 

 bulky, but is small in numbers compared with some of the 

 other collections. The Birds, the most complete collection 

 in the world, number some 500,000 skins and 100,000 eggs, 

 whilst the Insects total about 3,000,000 specimens. 



The Natural History Museum is not a zoological museum 

 only ; nevertheless 31 out of a total of 43 members of the 

 permanent scientific staff are zoologists, belonging to the 

 departments of Zoology, Entomology and Geology, and I need 

 hardly say that many times that number of zoologists, who come 

 from all parts of the world, find plenty of material to work on 

 in our vast national collections. 



Zoological research in our universities may be morpho- 

 logical or physiological, but one very large and essential 

 branch of zoological research, systematic work, the classifica- 

 tion of animals, can only be done properly with the aid of 

 large collections, such as those preserved in our National 

 Museum and in other great museums of the world. These 

 collections are permanent, they are records of past work to 

 which students of the present must refer, and as such they 

 are the basis of all systematic work, and to a large extent they 

 are the basis of other zoological work as well. 



The systematic zoologists who form the scientific staff of a 

 zoological museum are, of course, speciaUsts, each devoting 

 himself to some particular group of animals. The specialist 

 in a museimi need never be idle ; in addition to curatorial and 

 routine work he may, if he can find the time, monograph some 

 order, family or genus, and rearrange part of his collection 

 accordingly. New material is continually arriving, and the 

 new specimens have to be named and put away in their proper 

 place ; often reports, including descriptions of forms new to 



