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animals; a similar corner of the South American room, showing the llamas, armadillos, and sloths; and one side of the North American room with its bison, elk,&c. (Figs. 2, 3); but any general picture of the assemblage of animals is

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impossible in a photograph, owing to the distribution of the separate cases, which stand out between the windows.

It might perhaps be better in any future attempt to show the geographical distribution of animals in a museum, that a different method should be adopted. The two longest sides of a large room lighted from above or from the ends,

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should have cases about eight or ten feet wide, wholly glazed in front with as few bars as possible. If the floor of the cases were raised two feet above the floor of the room, sheets of glass eight or ten feet high might be fitted edge to edge, the joints being filled with Canada balsam, or some similar material, to render them-dust tight, the openings to the cases being at the back or the two ends. Each case should represent a scene characteristic of the Region represented. In that illustrating the Neotropical Region for instance, one case would represent a Brazilian forest, with, say, a tapir, some agoutis, ant-eaters, and sloths, all in natural attitudes and surroundings. troop of spider-monkeys; some macaws, toucans, chatterers, trogons, and curassows, would be seen perched upon the branches; an iguana, some ground lizards, and the great harlequin and elephant beetles would also appear in the foreground; while sitting upon leaves or on the ground, or flying in the air, would be a score or two of the most characteristic butterflies the blue morphos, the lovely catagrammas, the brilliant heliconii and ithomiæ, &c. There should be no crowding, no attempt to show too many species, but just that amount of characteristic life and that variety of form, structure, and colour, which might, under the most favourable conditions, be witnessed by a concealed observer.

The other side of the same room might be fitted to show the south temperate plains and the highlands of the Andes; and here would be seen the llamas and huanacos, the rheas, the condor, the vischaca, the chinchilla, the crested screamer, the puma, armadillos, and many humming-birds; with the characteristic vegetation and insects of the district.

If the six great regions of the globe were thus illustrated in the best possible manner, in some cases two rooms being devoted to a region, such a museum would be at once so attractive and so instructive, that comparatively little space would be required for a general collection to be exhibited to the public. In fact what is termed a typical collection, illustrating all the more important families, would be quite sufficient,

Extinct Forms of Life.

Four other rooms are also being prepared to exhibit the geological succession of animal life. In the first room the visitor will find illustrations of the mollusca, the trilobites, and the strange and often gigantic fishes of the palæozoic era down to the Devonian age. The next will contain the same groups as exhibited in the Carboniferous period, with the earliest forms of amphibia and reptiles, and their later developments in the Jurassic period when the first small mammals made their appearance. Here will be exhibited models of the huge reptile (Atlantosaurus) discovered by Professor Marsh, by far the largest of all terrestrial animals. Then will come a room devoted to the Cretaceous deposits, the wonderful giant Ammonites, and the abundant reptilian and bird forms which have been discovered in America. The last room of the series will be devoted to the Tertiary deposits, and will show the many curious lines of modification by which our most highly-specialized animals have been developed. If some of the preceding rooms contain the most marvellous products of remote ages, here assuredly will be the culminating point of interest in seeing the curious changes of form by which our existing cattle and horses, sheep, deer, and pigs, our wolves, bears, and lions, have been gradually modified from fewer and more generalized ancestral types.

Of all the great improvements in public museumarrangement which we owe to the late Professor Agassiz and his son, there is none so valuable as this. Let any one walk along the vast palæontological gallery at South Kensington, and note the crowded heaps of detached bones and jaws and teeth of fossil elephants and other animals, all set up in costly mahogany and glass cases for the public to stare at, with here and there a more complete specimen or a restoration; but all crowded together in one vast confusing series from which no clear ideas can possibly be obtained, except that numbers of strange animals, which are now extinct, did once live upon the

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globe, and he will certainly admit the imperfections of this mode of exhibition, as profitless and puzzling to the general public as it is wasteful of valuable space and inconvenient to the student or the specialist. In a proper system of arrangement all these fragments would be treated as material for study, not as specimens to be exhibited to the public. Casts and models of bones and other fossils can now be cheaply and easily made of paper, which when carefully coloured are to the ordinary eye indistinguishable from the specimen itself; and the materials already existing in the museums of Europe and America are so vast that nearly complete skeletons can be obtained of a great number of the more interesting extinct animals.

What ought to be exhibited to the public is a typical series of such skeletons or models, so arranged as to show the progression of forms and the evolution of the more specialized types as we advance from the earlier to the later geological periods. Instead of one huge gallery, a series of moderate-sized rooms should be constructed, each to illustrate one geological epoch, with subsidiary rooms where necessary to show the successive modifications which each class or order of animals has undergone. Where only fragments of an important type have been obtained, these might be exhibited with an explanation of why they are important, and an outline drawing showing the probable form and size of the entire animal. A museum of this kind, utilising the palæontological treasures of the whole world, would be of surpassing interest, and would probably exceed in attractiveness and popularity all existing museums. It would offer scope for a variety of groupings of extinct and living animals, calculated, as Professor Agassiz intended his museum to do, “to illustrate the history of creation, as far as the present state of scientific knowledge reveals that history." It is surely an anomaly that the naturalist who was most opposed to the theory of evolution should be the first to arrange his museum in such a way as best to illustrate that theory, while in the land of Darwin no step has been taken to escape from the monotonous routine of one great systematic series of crowded specimens, arranged in lofty halls and palatial galleries, which may excite wonder, but which are calculated to teach no definite lesson.

A grand opportunity is now afforded for a man of great wealth, who wishes to do something for the intellectual advancement of the masses. Let him build and endow a "Museum of Comparative Palæontology," for the purpose of carrying out Agassiz's idea on a scale worthy of it. Such a museum, built on the plan of that at Harvard, but with rooms of a larger average size, would easily accommodate the far larger number of spectators that would certainly visit it, and would tend more than anything else could do to raise the sciences of palæontology and zoology in popular estimation, and to clear away the clouds of misunderstanding which still enshroud the grand theory of evolution. It would enable the general public to appreciate for the first time the marvellous story presented by the sequence of animal life upon the globe, and would at once instruct and elevate the mind by exhibiting the comparative insignificance of existing animals, in variety and often in size, to those which have preceded them, and by demonstrating the innumerable and startling changes of the forms of life upon the globe during the long series of ages which preceded the advent of man. Such a museum would certainly become the most popular, as it would be the most instructive, of all the great scientific exhibitions yet established, while its founder would secure to himself an amount of honourable fame rarely accorded to those who devote money to public purposes.

Museums of American Pre-historic Archæology.

Few Englishmen have any adequate idea of the present condition of the study of prehistoric archæology in America, or are at all aware of the vast extent and interesting character of the collections which illustrate the early history of that continent. The recognition of the antiquity of man in Europe, and the establishment of the successive periods characterized by the palæolithic

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