BOTANICAL WORK OF THE BRITISH ASSOCIATION. 461 



up is promptly thrown aside. If you supply the apple blossom for 

 actual description, you are as likely as not to he furnished with a 

 detailed account of a buttercup. The training' of observation has gone 

 by the board and the exercise of mere memory has taken its place. 

 But a table of logarithms or a Hebrew grammar would serve this pur- 

 pose equally well. Yet I do not despair of Henslow's work still bear- 

 ing fruit. The examination system will collapse from the sheer 

 impossibility of carrying it on beyond a certain point. Freed from its 

 trammels, the teacher will have greater scope for individuality, and the 

 result of his labors will be rewarded after some intelligent system of 

 inspection. And here I may claim support from an unexpected quar- 

 ter. Mr. Gladstone has recently written to a correspondent: " I think 

 that the neglect of natural history, in all its multitude of branches, was 

 the grossest defect of our old system of training for the young; and, 

 further, that little or nothing has been done by way of remedy for that 

 defect in the attempts made to alter or reform that system." I am sure 

 that the importance and weight of this testimony, coming as it does 

 from one whose training and sympathies have always been literary, 

 can not be denied. That there is already some revival of Henslow's 

 methods, I judge from the fact that I have received applications from 

 board schools, amounting to some hundreds, for surplus specimens 

 from the Kew Museums. Without a special machinery for the purpose 

 I can not do much, and perhaps it is well. But my staff have willingly 

 done what was possible, and from the letters I have received I gather 

 that the labor has not been wholly misspent. 



MUSEUM ARRANGEMENT. 



This leads me to the last branch of Henslow's scientific work on 

 which I am able to touch, that of the arrangement of museums, 

 especially those which being local have little meaning unless their pur- 

 pose is strictly educational. I think it is now generally admitted that 

 both in the larger and narrower aspects of the question, his ideas, 

 which were shared in some measure by Edward Forbes, were not 

 merely far in advance of his time, but was essentially sound. And 

 here I can not help remarking that the zoologists have perhaps profited 

 more by his teaching than the botanists. I do not know how far Sir 

 William Flower and Professor Lankester would admit the influence of 

 Henslow's ideas. But so far as my knowledge goes, I am not aware 

 that, at any rate in Europe, there is anything to be seen in public 

 museums comparable to the educational work accomplished by the one 

 at the College of Surgeons and the Natural History Museum, and by 

 the other at Oxford. 



I have often thought it singular that in botany we have not kept 

 pace in this matter with our brother naturalists. I do not doubt that 

 vegetable morphology and a vast number of important facts in evolu- 

 tion, as illustrated from the vegetable kingdom, might be presented to 



