somehow
this fits on to that, I will be bound that, at a year's end, draw one as
big as the other, and he won't know a lion's head from a tiger's--nor a
lion's skull from a rabbit's. Nor is it the parish boy only who suffers.
The scientific people themselves miss half their points from the habit
of hacking at things, instead of looking at them. When I gave my lecture
on the Swallow[6] at Oxford, I challenged every anatomist there to tell
me the use of his tail (I believe half of them didn't know he had one).
Not a soul of them could tell me, which I knew beforehand; but I did not
know, till I had looked well through their books, how they were
quarreling about his wings! Actually at this moment (Easter Tuesday,
1880), I don't believe you can find in any scientific book in Europe a
true account of the way a bird flies--or how a snake serpentines. My
Swallow lecture was the first bit of clear statement on the one point,
and when I get my Snake lecture published, you will have the first
extant bit of clear statement on the other; and that is simply because
the anatomists can't, for their life, look at a thing till they have
skinned it.

201. And matters get worse and worse every hour. Yesterday, after
writing the first leaf of this note, I went into the British Museum, and
found a nasty skeleton of a lizard, with its under jaw dropped off, on
the top of a table of butterflies--temporarily of course--but then
everything has been temporary or temporizing at the British Museum for
the last half-century; making it always a mere waste and weariness to
the general public, because, forsooth, it had always to be kept up to
the last meeting of the Zoological Society, and last edition of the
_Times_. As if there had not been beasts enough before the Ark to tell
our children the manners of, on a Sunday afternoon!

202. I had gone into the Museum that day to see the exact form of a
duck's wing, the examination of a lively young drake's here at Coniston
having closed in his giving me such a cut on the wrist with it, that I
could scarcely write all the morning afterwards. Now in the whole bird
gallery there are only two ducks' wings expanded, and those in different
positions. Fancy the difference to the mob, and me, if the shells and
monkey skeletons were taken away from the mid-gallery, and instead,
three gradated series of birds put down the length of it (or half the
length--or a quarter would do it--with judgment), showing the
tran