REVIEW. 
Essays on Museums and other subjects connected with Natural History. 
By Sir William Henry Flower, K.C.B., LL.D., F.R.S., &c. 
8vo, pp. xv. and 394. Price 12s. net. (Macmillan & Co., 
1898.) 
Whilst we must all regret the cause for the “enforced 
period of restraint from active occupation ” to which Sir William 
Flower alludes in the preface to this work, we cannot but con- 
gratulate ourselves on the advantage which accrues to us from 
his leisure. When a young and promising worker, a Francis 
Balfour, for instance, is removed by an untimely fate, his 
surviving admirers may piously collect the scattered papers 
containing the suggestive opuscula of a recognised master ; but 
how much rather would we that the master should survive, and 
after long years of active work should himself select and arrange 
in volume form the essays which we have valued on their former 
appearance in various journals. 
Sir William Flower’s volume contains twenty-four essays, 
which form four groups, seven dealing with museums, eight 
with general biology, five with anthropology, and four with the 
lives of his most illustrious contemporary English zoologists. 
No one can speak with the same authority upon the subject of 
museum organisation as the Director of the Natural History 
Museum : indeed we have often thought that, great as have 
been his services to osteology, Sir William Flower’s most lasting 
monument is to be seen in that entrance-hall of our national 
museum where he has given us in the central cases one of the 
most complete object-lessons possible in Darwinian evolution, 
and in the recesses has planned an equally unrivalled index 
collection to that comparative anatomy which must ever be the 
basis of our classification of animals or plants. We live in 
hopes of seeing in the pages of Nature Notes those articles on 
this multum in parvo which were promised in our prospectus more 
than eight years ago. Meanwhile any members of the Selborne 
Society who are interested in museums either as custodians or 
as students will find much in the earlier essays in Sir William 
Flower’s volume of the very highest practical value. As it 
seems to us very desirable from the point of view of real teaching 
in natural history, as opposed to mere book-learning, that 
museums should be multiplied all over the country, we cannot, 
in spite of the exigencies of our space, refrain from quoting one 
passage from the first essay : — 
“The first consideration in establishing a museum, large or small, either in a 
town, institution, society, or school, is that it should have some definite object or 
purpose to fulfil ; and the next is that means should be forthcoming not only to 
establish but also to maintain the museum in a suitable manner to fulfil that 
purpose. Some persons are enthusiastic enough to think that a museum is in 
itself so good an object that they have only to provide a building and cases and a 
certain number of specimens, no matter exactly what, to fill them, and then the 
