A VERY POPULAR VIEW OF THE SCIENTIFIC TREASURES AT SOUTH
KENSINGTON.
DASSING through Mr. Frank Buckland's collection of fish, and all things appertaining to fishing, at the South Ken- sington Museum, is not a bad preparation of the mind for the 4' Special Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus" upstairs. One walks along a double avenue of monsters of the deep, with the stony glare peculiar to their tribe faithfully reproduced in these huge casts ; conscious of side-alleys set thick with dreadful things in bottles and cases, cunning weapons for the destruction of the finny creatures, and tasteful mural festoons of every variety of the treacherous fly. One's mind gets into the attitude proper to museum-visiting,—that of recognition of how much more there is in everything than one has any ordinary idea of; and impressed, if not oppressed, with a sense of one's own profound ignorance, general and special. Grave men, who look as if they knew all about everything—the heavens above, the earth beneath, the waters under the earth—hurry past Mr. Buckland's pets ; they have not a regret for the baby-porpoise, limp and pathetic, with his little mortuary inscription ; not a thought for the curious Arctic chimmra, which wraps its transparent body about with its opaline-hued wing-fins, and glides amid the secrets of the sea with eyes like large, lucent pearls, set in dissipated sockets. They heed not the scientific charm of the neatly-dissected electric eel, whose internal arrangements puzzle the present writer as much as do the wonders upstairs, which break upon one's vision with a brilliant blaze, full of flashes, from an electric-light centre ; with a peculiar acrid odour, as of everything being slowly burned up everywhere, and with the steady hum of the bands and cranks and wheels of steam-driven machinery. Grave men muster strong in the Loan rooms, and there is much guttural growling of a com- placent kind, by groups around the most complicated and awful objects displayed, which one takes to be the expression of Ger- man satisfaction with the undeniable distinction of the Father- land on this occasion, in its vernacular.
Whether the ignorant or the learned visitor derives the greater pleasure from such an exhibition as the latest addition to the
South Kensington treasure-house is a question which each will answer in his own way, and no one can 4' limp," as Mr. Leland says; but there's a strong case to be made for ignorance. The wonder of it, the incredibility of it, the little bits of perception gained after careful reading of labels and handbook instructions, even the absolute giving it up in many cases, where the mere names of the wonderful things in bright metals, and of strange forms, are entirely beyond one; the glimpses of the feats of the past, and the possibilities of the future, which come to contem- plative ignorance, are not to be despised, except by Lord. Macaulay's schoolboy. Knowledge would disdain the notion which the wonderful show suggests to ignorance,—the notion of the earth as a powerful and beautiful queen, and these things the appareil of her state, the implements for her use, the devices by which her strength, her beauty, her majesty, her beneficence, her awfulness, and her wealth are estimated, and developed, and demonstrated. The genius, and the learning, and the labour which are represented here are her willing servants ; they have filled this treasure-house, council-chamber, tiring-room of the earth. Reserved as she is mighty, this great queen has revealed her mysteries very slowly, and with calm disdain of the span-long lives of her eagerly- listening interpreters to the ages. Among the machines, how vividly come the images of the men ; in the presence of the re- sults, how one pictures the researches ; looking at the charts and diagrams, the maps and tabular statements upon the walls, which take the seas and the rivers, the mountains, the clouds, the winds, and the mines to pieces like a child's puzzle, one thinks of all the hands that have been put to that writing. Here is a wall hung with deep-sea-sounding implements, and things for grubbing up the "sea-floor ;" there's a "clam," which looks as if it were intended to draw sharks' teeth, and a hook which would be the very thing for Behemoth. Here are cases full of the latest inventions whereby the waves may be measured and the air weighed, the wind, timed in its rush and sweep, the minutest fraction of the moments ticked off by mechanism so beautiful, that the most delicate jewellery is not to be compared with it in mere charm to the eye, working so rapidly that it defies the following of thought, through metal so fine that. its vibrations seem to thrill through a living tissue. And there's the quadrant which Captain Cook used in his sail round the world, and a plain, shabby time-keeper which ticked off two of his voyages through unknown seas to lands with which we talk by telegraph to-day. Only in the next room is a gentleman pointing with a long wand to some diagrams on paraffin-prepared paper—they look very like Punch's old pictorial joke of "the last portrait of Mr. Harrison Ainsworth," which represented the top of that novelist's head, with the hair in a fine frenzy—and explain- ing how he has effected an extraordinary economy of magneto- something power by means of the invention which these diagrams demonstrate, and the ignorant one feels awe and surprise at the notion of " waste " of this invisible commodity. It is a new idea of "the electric fluency," it makes one think of Rob the Grinder, and for just a minute pats the matter in a ludicrous light, especially as the gentleman shows us a " beautiful " little machine, like a toy cannon, with green-wire arrange- ments, which saves up the magneto-something power satis- factorily. Everybody is delighted ; the Macaulay schoolboy is well to the fore, but does any one suppose the ignorant member of that casual congregation enjoyed the discourse less than he? The fascination of electricity for ignorance is perhaps only exceeded by that of astronomy, so that it is pecu- liarly delightful, after watching the wonderful flame, and a beautiful machine for type-casting,—which presents the general effect of a young gentleman very rapidly fingering a delicately constructed church organ, with rhythmical clicks as the result,— to betake oneself to the department of Astronomical Science. Telescopes are wonderful things to the imagination, especially if one has never succeeded in really seeing anything through the humblest specimen of their order; and astrolabes are not with- out their charm, in particular one that was constructed for Sir Francis Drake in 1570, and another, very beautifully carved and set, with a fine miniature painting on the case of Christ,—his hand raised in benediction,—which comes from Madrid, lent by the Ministry of Marine. To whom did it belong? Here is a splendid astrolabe made for Philip II., but we prefer to believe that the, other belonged to Columbus. Here is Sir Isaac Newton's own telescope, a shabby, sacred little object ; and the glass which re- vealed Uranus to Herschel, and Tycho de &she's quadrant, and the "Orrery," concerning the name -of which Dick Steele gave its perfector, Rowley, the clever hint which associates the invention
with Earl John. And from the Accaclemia del Cimento at Florence what priceless contributions ! All Galileo's instruments are here, presided over by a bust of the astronomer, with grim features, shaggy eyebrows, and a wart upon the right cheek- bone, evidently prized as highly as Cromwell's. The Italian collection is especially remarkable for the elegant fittings and finish of the articles, incomprehensible, of course ; and for the curious mingling of science and elegance, in some cases of thermometrical instruments. The glass stems and globes are of lovely, fantastic shapes, and exquisitely jewelled. They brighten up the severe surroundings, for despite their beauty, and the sense which they convey of power and accuracy, there is something severe, and almost cruel, in the aspect of the Collection as a whole. The cogs and wheels, and the speckless, shining metal, everywhere convey this impression. As a child, who was rather alarmed at the aspect of a huge wind-force-measuring monster, like a com- bination of windmill-arm, archangel's trumpet, and lancer's spear, at the top of a ladder, remarked, "They look as if they would hurt."
" Comet-seeker " is a name to make one think, as one stands before it ; and a moon-chart beautifully executed, with the earth, like a plover's egg in proportion to it, is a striking object in the cosmographical collection. Probably knowledge would not take much heed of the chart which lays out time and tides five hundred years back, and on to A.D. 2,000, but it has a charm for ignor- ance; and so has a small, plain box, with barrels and wire among its contents, in the Italian collection, which bears this inscription, —" Macchina magneto-elettrica che diede la prima scintilla. 1832."
The department of Weights and Measures is highly imposing, from its yard-measure and bushel presented to Winchester by Henry 11., and Queen Elizabeth's imperial pint, to the daintiest cop- per and glass receptacles of to-day; from the beautiful scales which weigh the most precious and the most deadly things with more than hair's-breadth nicety, to the marvellous instruments which weigh the sunbeams and the winds, and measure the waves, and calculate the speed of projectiles and the rate at which men may be killed. Mr. Babbage's Calculating Machine will probably occupy, with respect to this Exhibition, a position of favour similar to that of the Diving Bell at the Polytechnic. It is very ugly, and by the time one has contemplated the completed marvels of all sorts of science, and pulls up before it, it is almost a relief to think it was never finished. The clocks and the chronometers, the baro- meters, the aneroids, and innumerable other instruments for making one fully understand that time is fleeting and the weather "trying," are marvellous and beautiful to behold ; but the present ignorant writer presumes to think that though it is very nice to see at South Kensington, it would be rather oppressive to live in a room with one of those latest results of time and the keeping of it,—a horological and meteorological marvel, in which a self- acting pencil dots down the atmospheric variations as the minutes go by.
The models are very fascinating, and they are not so puzzling as the working machines, which one admires with blind reverence, though a lady did impart to her inquiring offspring her belief that Mr. Browning's "Radiometer" had "something to do with a patent stove." Geometrical puzzles in cardboard and polished wood are among the easiest of the objects displayed. There is a grand simplicity about the lighthouse apparatus, and also about the gunnery. One feels one's ignorance most deeply, and has one's interest and curiosity most strongly aroused among the marvellous instruments of the higher sciences, as one looks at them, wonder- ing what sort of experience life must be, to the men who have tracked them to the stage of development which finds its ex- pression in the South Kensington Loan Collection of Scientific Apparatus.
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