recious stuff with beeswax for modelling purposes. At
that date one would as soon have mixed amber with pitch. That reminds
me that "grey amber" or "ambergris" is also a product of the sperm
whale not to be confounded with spermaceti. It is an unhealthy
intestinal concretion like bezoar-stone (see p. 64), only
exceptionally produced. It is found floating in the ocean, and is
recognised as coming from the cachalot owing to its being largely made
up of the horny beaks of cuttle-fish, upon which the cachalot feeds.
It is still used in perfumery, and fetches the extraordinary price of
four guineas the ounce. A piece weighing 4-1/2 oz. may be seen in
Cromwell Road.

Though the oils (or fats) of plants and animals are very similar to
one another in appearance, there are a very large number of them
differing chemically from one another. Thus the fat or oil of dozens
of different nuts and plant-products and of lower animals and fishes,
and of sheep, oxen, pigs, dogs, elephants, and men contain different
and special chemical substances, corresponding to the "cetyl" which is
present in the fat of the sperm whale's head. Many of them have
acquired as a result of experience and tradition special value for
some special purpose. Several oils have peculiar fitness and great
value for oiling delicate machinery; others are used in curing
leather, for burning, and for medicinal ointments, whilst a large
variety is used as human food.

CHAPTER XIX

MUSEUMS

The word "museum" is not one of those which explain themselves and
give an indication of what the thing to which they are applied should
be, when it has ceased to be what it was intended to be. In ancient
Greece the word "mouseion" meant "the place of the Muses"--a grove or
a temple--and there was such a place on a part of the Acropolis of
Athens, the rocky temple-crowned hill around which the city was built.
There were other "museums," or seats of the Muses, in ancient Greece;
those on the slopes of Mount Helicon and of Mount Olympus were the
most famous. In modern times a picture gallery and art collection,
that of the Louvre, in Paris, is called "the Musee," whilst "the
Museum" (the Latin form of the same word) is the name distinctively
applied in Paris to the collections of natural history and the
laboratories connected with them in the Jardin des Plantes. In London
"the British Museum," founded in 1753, originally comprised the
national library as well as collections