314 MUSEUMS 



bury, was purchased by the State to serve as a "repository" 

 (the word used in the Act of Parliament of that date) for 

 the vast collections of natural history made by Sir Hans 

 Sloane, with which were associated certain valuable 

 libraries and collections of manuscripts, of coins, and 

 antique marbles. A large part of the money required for 

 the undertaking was raised by a public lottery, over which 

 the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and 

 the Speaker presided (according to the custom of those 

 days in regard to State lotteries), and it is thus that this 

 remarkable group of great officials became, and have 

 remained ever since, " the Three Principal Trustees of 

 the British Museum." Additional trustees were named 

 (since increased to a total of nearly fifty), and provision 

 was made for the appointment of a principal librarian and 

 other curators of the collections. The Act declared that 

 the collections placed in the " repository" (Montagu House) 

 were to remain there for the benefit and enjoyment of 

 posterity for ever — a provision which until seven years ago 

 was misinterpreted, so as to prevent the sending out of 

 unnamed and unstudied collections of small portable 

 objects like insects, dried plants, and shells, to be named 

 and compared with other specimens, by foreign naturalists. 

 Consequently, there was a great accumulation of speci- 

 mens unstudied and useless, and a great loss to knowledge. 

 But the late Lord Chancellor (Halsbury) decided that it 

 was not only legally within the power of the trustees 

 temporarily to remove specimens from " the repository " 

 for the purpose of having them named and studied, but 

 actually their duty- to do so. 



We now very generally recognise in Great Britain, as 

 in other parts of the civilised world, the value and im- 

 portance of public "museums "in the sense of "reposi- 

 tories of collections of objects of ancient and modern art 

 and of natural history." Museums, as at present existing, 



