sketchy versatility. In walking through
the usually "dry-as-dust" collections you find numbers of very
atrociously-rendered mammals, a greater sprinkling of funereal and
highly-disreputable birds, some extremely-protracted fishes, some
chipped insects, and a lot of shells, chiefly marine, which suggest
association with the word "stores." I allude to those odds and ends
which people do not want themselves, and which are, therefore, so
kindly brought as an offering--would I might say a "burnt" one--to
any institution so reckless of consequences as to admit them.

Nearly all museums of early days were imitators of the British Museum,
whilst those of later days affect the newer treatment of South
Kensington. Hence, in walking through any museum, a technical observer
can easily detect the sources of inspiration and the lines of
demarcation between the old and the new. Really it amounts to this,
that hardly any institution in England thinks for itself. Museum
authorities, like sheep, follow the lead of the most ancient
bell-wether; and the reason of this is not far to seek. Curators, as a
rule, are men with one hobby--"one-horse" men, as the Americans so
aptly put it--"sometimes wise, sometimes otherwise," but in many cases
totally devoid of that technical education so much needed in
reconciling the divergent atoms of the institutions they represent; in
fact, head and hand seldom work together.

Often, owing to the want of technical advice, money is wasted in more
than one department, cases are too highly paid for, and have not been
thought out sufficiently as to their fitness for their future
contents, or the position in which they are to be placed, or the more
fatal error has been perpetrated of considering them as merely units
of a certain department instead of parts of a whole. I contend that if
it be necessary for a civil engineer or other professional man to have
mastered the various technicalities of his profession, it is also
incumbent on curators to have done or to do likewise, in order that
they may grasp the treatment of their museum as a whole, and not fall
into the grave fault of working up one department whilst ignoring the
others.

Nothing is more distasteful to my mind than that a man in the position
of a curator should impertinently ride one single hobby to death, to
the utter exclusion and detriment of all other branches of knowledge
entrusted to his care. What is the sum total of this? In looking
around