any museum of old standing we see twenty different styles and
colours of cases, which may be briefly summarized as representing the
eocene, miocene, and pliocene formation of cases; space has been
wasted, or not utilized as it might be, and the result is a confused
jumble of odds and ends, consequent on some persons considering that
the end and aim of a museum should be the preservation of "bullets"
collected by "Handy-Andy" from the field of "Arrah-na-Pogue," "My
Grandfather's Clock," and so on.

This is certainly not the mission of any museum, nor should it lay
itself out with avidity to collect disjointed scraps of savage life,
such as portraits of the "ladies" who ate cold savage and
who--horresco referens!--"drank his blood." [Footnote: A fact!]

Such a museum object as this, awfully, yet ludicrously, reminds me of
that showman who enticed his audience in with--"Here you'll see the
Duke of Vellington at the battle of Vauterloo, with the blood all
a-runnen down his fut,"' or of poor little "Totty" (in "Helen's
Babies"), who loved to hear about "B'liaff" and his headlessness, and
the sword that was all "bluggy." This is, I think, one of the mistakes
which most museums fall into. They collect a vast quantity of rubbish
utterly useless to anyone but a schoolboy or a showman, and in
consequence they find valuable space wasted to make way for tops of
teapots, bits of leather, Kaffirs' or Zulus' knives made in Sheffield,
native ornaments, in beads and brass, made in Birmingham, and
such-like members of the great family of "curios." All such as these
should be firmly and respectfully declined without thanks. [Footnote:
When I first came to the Leicester Museum I was requested to present
to the Museum and enclose in a suitable receptacle--No. 1, a piece of
thick leather, which the donor thought "just the right thickness for
the heel of a boot;" and No. 2 a teapot lid with no particular
history, only that--as the dame who brought it phrased it--"maybe it's
summat old."]

I have spoken, in somewhat sacrilegious terms, of imitation of the
worst points of the old British Museum and of South Kensington (I
don't mean the new Natural History Galleries, but artistic South
Kensington); but perhaps I may be forgiven when I state that I
consider, and always considered, the weakest part of our old natural
history galleries at Bloomsbury was the arrangement of all the
mammals, birds, etc, in that provokingly "fore-and-aft" manner (s