hibits
have high artistic value in addition to their striking scientific worth.
They teach ornithology as it should be taught, giving such clews to
the recognition of birds in the fields as are not at all to be found in
ordinary collections of stuffed specimens. This feature of the museum
has, to be sure, been imitated in the American Museum of Natural History
in New York, but the South Kensington Museum was the first in the field
and is still the leader.

A few words should be added as to the use made by the public of the
treasures offered for their free inspection by the British Museum. I
shall attempt nothing further than a few data regarding actual visits to
the museum. In the year 1899 the total number of such visits
aggregated 663,724; in 1900 the figures rise to 689,249--well towards
three-quarters of a million. The number of visits is smallest in the
winter months, but mounts rapidly in April and May; it recedes slightly
for June and July, and then comes forward to full tide in August, during
which month more than ninety-five thousand people visited the museum
in 1901, the largest attendance in a single day being more than nine
thousand. August, of course, is the month of tourists--particularly of
tourists from America--but it is interesting and suggestive to note
that it is not the tourist alone who visits the British Museum, for the
flood-tide days of attendance are always the Bank holidays, including
Christmas boxing-day and Easter Monday, when the working-people turn out
_en masse_. On these days the number of visits sometimes mounts above
ten thousand.

All this, it will be understood, refers exclusively to the main building
of the museum on Great Russell Street. But, meantime, out in Kensington,
at the natural history museum, more than half a million visits each year
are also made. In the aggregate, then, about a million and a quarter of
visits are paid to the British Museum yearly, and though the bulk of the
visitors may be mere sight-seers, yet even these must carry away many
ideas of value, and it hardly requires argument to show that, as a
whole, the educational influence of the British Museum must be enormous.
Of its more direct stimulus to scientific work through the trained
experts connected with the institution I shall perhaps speak in another
connection.

II. THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LONDON FOR IMPROVING NATURAL KNOWLEDGE

A SESSION OF THE SOCIETY

THERE is one scientific institution in