C22’) 
NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS. 
Essays on Museums and other Subjects connected with Natural 
History. By Sir Witu1am Henry Fiower, K.C.B. 
Macmillan & Co., Limited. 
Siz Witu1am F'Lower in this volume has collected and pub- 
lished most of the principal essays and addresses which he has 
from time to time written or delivered on Zoological—including 
Anthropological—subjects, and which from their non-technical 
character appeal not only to naturalists but also to the usual 
cultured reader. There is always a danger that the special element 
of a man’s great success may prove a cloud which serves to obscure 
his other qualities. We are so apt to think and read of the 
author as the greatest of contemporary Museum Directors, that 
we are liable to overlook the fact that his influence on Zoology 
has been exercised over a wider field, and that his services to 
_ Anthropology in England have been of a signal character. 
The first seven chapters or essays are altogether devoted 
to “Museums,” a subject which to the general public would 
probably be thought threadbare, by the rank and file of ordinary 
curators has been canonised and fossilised, and which is now in 
its renaissance both in Europe and America, with potentialities 
for instruction which democracies have hardly yet suspected, and 
which in time they will very heartily support. The Museum of 
the future must serve two purposes; not only must it prove the 
temple for scientific study and research, by vast accumulation 
of specimens, and not by a limitation to examples as in a Noachian 
collection; but it must be made to attract and instruct our general 
humanity in the secrets and charms of the animal life to which 
it belongs, of that which has preceded its era, and of that which 
has vanished and is still vanishing from its contact. The time is 
past when the wretched holiday seeker, uninstructed in zoology, 
unassisted by state-paid instructors or guides, wanders his weary 
way past miles of glass cases crammed with stuffed skins, and 
