NATURAL HISTORY AND MUSEUMS.*
THE publication of this volume of collected essays has been followed by the author's resignation of his post as Director of the Natural History Museum. Sir William Flower is not only experienced as a curator of museums, he is also distin- guished as a naturalist ; and there is much that is worthy of note in the papers, articles, and lectures which are brought together in the present volume. The contents (which begin with seven essays on the management and requirements of museums, and pass, by way of general biology, to anthropology) include plenty which may prove interesting as well to the general reader as the specialist. To the former may be particularly recommended the chapters on the recent advances in natural science in relation to the Christian faith, a paper read at the Church Congress; the history of the Zoological Society, an address delivered at the general meeting in the year of Jubilee, 1887; two lectures on whales ; and the last papers in the volume, the one on pigmy races of men, the other on fashion in deformity. The study of natural history and the formation of museums have always gone together; the first is impossible without the second ; and yet it is only within recent years that a museum has existed which in any way has fulfilled its proper office. The word itself is old enough ; and the first institution which bore the name of museum (or haunt of the muses) was that founded by Ptolemy Soter at Alexandria about 300 B.C. Such is the derivation of the word; but we well remember the time when we associated it with Saturday afternoons among the delightful stuffed monkeys at Bloomsbury, and derived the word a museum from the same root as the verb to amuse. With the revival of learning at the end of the Middle Ages, the collecting instinct led to the formation of varied museums by ruling Princes, great merchants, and learned physicians. The cata- logues are still existing of the museum of Quickelberg (a doctor of Amsterdam) and of Kentmann (a physician of Torgau) in 1565. The Emperor Rudolph II. accumulated the objects which formed the foundations of the museums of Vienna. In England the two Tradescants published in 1656 the Muszeum Tradescantianum ; or, A Collection of Rarities preserved at South Lambeth, near London. Among the feathers from the tail of the plaenix, the eggs of a dragon, and the claws of the rock, there was the identical dodo whose head and foot are still among the most precious possessions of the University Museum at Oxford. A few years later, the Royal Society established their museum in Crane Court, of which an illustrated catalogue was published in 1681. Sir Hans Sloane's collections expanded till they formed the nucleus of the British Museum ; and now that has so vastly increased, by the accumulation of objects, that it has been found necessary to transfer the whole of the natural history departments from Bloomsbury to Kensington.
It must be remembered that to most people a museum suggests the very essence of boredom. Very few among the upper classes, and fewer in proportion among the lower, have ever been inside the British Museum ; fewer still have been more than once. Of the visitors to the various collections, few look at the objects at all, fewer still understand what they are looking at, and the vast majority are content to wander listlessly from case to case and, yawn- ing wearily, from room to room. It is the same with the National Gallery ; yet no sooner do folks go for their annual trip abroad than they think it necessary to toil laboriously
• Essays on Museums and Other Subjects Connected with Natural History. By Sir William Henry Flower. London: Macmillan and Co. MCI
through all the picture-galleries of Paris or Rome, of Vienna or Munich, though they never dream of going to Trafalgar Square. Yet we believe that a good museum is, for those who visit it intelligently, the most valuable means of education which the State can provide. A national museum must fulfil two totally distinct objects : it must provide means for students to pursue their researches, and also cases of objects displayed for the instruction of the public. This distinction is a com- paratively recent idea, and we believe that the failure of museums to fulfil their part is mainly due to its non-obser- vance. Cases were crammed with specimens in every state of disorder and decay, such as, in many local museums, may still be seen
To demand, as has been ignorantly done, that all the speci- mens belonging to our national museums, for instance, should be displayed in cases in the public galleries would be equivalent to asking that every book in a library, instead of being shut up and arranged on shelves for consultation when required, should have every single page framed and glazed and hung on the walls. that the humblest visitor, as he passes along the galleries, I ; only to open his eyes and revel in the wealth of literature of all ages and all countries without so much as applying to a custodian to open a case."
The proper duty of a well-arranged educational museum is to be "a collection of instructive labels illustrated by well- selected specimens." Yet many museums (especially in provincial towns) are merely accumulations of objects which
local benefactors have found it convenient to dispose of. Such places may be useful as cemeteries for curios ; they are certainly of no value as museums :—
"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 thing is done ; whereas the truth is the work has only then begun. What a museum really depends upon for its success and usefulness is, not its building, not its cases, not even its specimens, but its curator. He and his staff are the life and soul of the institution, upon whom its whole value depends ; and yet in many—I may say most—of our museums they are the last to be thought of. The care, the preservation, the naming of the specimens are either left to voluntary effort—excellent often for special collections and for a limited time, but never to be depended on as a permanent arrangement—or a grievously undersalaried, and con- sequently uneducated, official is expected to keep in order, to clean dust, arrange, name, and display in a manner which will contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge, collections ranging in extent over almost every branch of human learning, from the contents of an ancient British barrow to the last discovered bird of paradise from New Guinea."
Linnwus, the father of modern naturalists, was, we are told, greatly assisted in his early studies by the valuable zoological collections which it was the ruling passion of several Kings
and Queens of Sweden to bring together. But zoology and museums have made considerable progress since the last edition of the Systema Natum, revised by the author, was
published in 1766. The collected knowledge of all the zoologists, botanists, and mineralogists since the dawn of science was industriously put together and arranged by a man of astonishing genius. Yet Linuteus only mentions two hundred and twenty species of mammals. The greatest difference, perhaps, between the ideas of our time and those of Linnwus, is that we now know that the
animals existing on the earth are merely a few sur- vivors of an immense number of different species, about whom nothing was then known, and much, we may hope, will be discovered still. The whole science of anthropology has been created since the time of Linnteus ; yet man's position is practically the same in the Linnean classification as that now assigned him by nearly all zoologists, who treat him as a subject for classification upon zoological, and not
metaphysical, grounds. The knowledge of Linnwus far sur- passed that of all his contemporaries ; yet he knew but an inconsiderable fragment of what we know now of the nature of the universe and its inhabitants. We may well end with the words which Linnmus chose to put at the beginning of his work, and which Sir William Flower quotes :—
"0, Jebova, quam ampla aunt tua opera ! Quam sapienter ea fecisti !
Quam plena est terra possessione tua! "
Previous page
