CHAPTER XYI. 



On Natural History Museums, with special reference 

 TO a New System of Pictorial Arrangement of 

 Vertebrates. 



I MUST confess that, at one time, tlie consideration of the best 

 method of dealing to advantage with the limited space nsually 

 existing in the older provincial museums would have dismayed 

 me. Even at that time, however, I had glimmerings of the 

 brighter light which has since illumined the way, and I was, 

 perhaps, aided by the persistent manner in which I haunted 

 museums both abroad and at home, until at last I never 

 went on a journey without managing to br'eak it, or to make it 

 end at the then summum honum of my happiness — a museum. 

 Like Diogenes, I went about with my lamp to find, not an 

 honest man, but an honest museum — a museum with some 

 originality, and with some definite idea as to its sphere of 

 work. Leaving out, of course, such complete and technical 

 institutions as the Museum of Geology, the Museum of the 

 College of Surgeons, and such institutions which really have 

 a motive in view — steadfastly adhered to — I saw, then as now, 

 that every provincial museum was nothing if left to its own 

 devices, and, if " inspired," was, at the best, but a sorry and 

 servile imitator of the worst points of our national museum. 

 Everyone must have observed, no doubt, in any provincial 

 museum which dates back thirty or forty years, that the great 

 curse of the collection, so to speak, is sketchy versatility. 

 In walking through the usually " dry-as-dust " collections you 

 find numbers of very atrociously-rendered mammals, a greater 

 sprinkling of funereal and highly- disreputable birds, some 



