st on
them.

198. A Museum, primarily, is to be for _simple_ persons. Children, that
is to say, and peasants. For your student, your antiquary, or your
scientific gentleman, there must be separate accommodation, or they must
be sent elsewhere. The Town Museum is to be for the Town's People, the
Village Museum for the Villagers. Keep that first principle clear to
start with. If you want to found an academy of painting in
Littleborough, or of literature in Squattlesea Mere, you must get your
advice from somebody else, not me.

199. Secondly. The museum is to manifest to these simple persons the
beauty and life of all things and creatures in their perfectness. Not
their modes of corruption, disease, or death. Not even, always, their
genesis, in the more or less blundering beginnings of it; not even their
modes of nourishment, if destructive; you must not stuff a blackbird
pulling up a worm, nor exhibit in a glass case a crocodile crunching a
baby.

Neither must you ever show bones or guts, or any other charnel-house
stuff. Teach your children to know the lark's note from the
nightingale's; the length of their larynxes is their own business, and
God's.

I cannot enough insist upon this point, nor too solemnly. If you wish
your children to be surgeons, send them to Surgeons' College; if
jugglers or necromancers, to Messrs. Maskelyne and Cooke; and if
butchers, to the shambles: but if you want them to lead the calm life of
country gentlemen and gentlewomen, manservants and maidservants, let
them seek none of Death's secrets till they die. Ever faithfully and
affectionately yours,

J. R.

_Easter Tuesday, 1880._

DEAR ----,

200. I must enter to-day somewhat further on the practical, no less than
emotional, reason for the refusal of anatomical illustrations to the
general public.

It is difficult enough to get one clear idea into anybody, of any single
thing. But next to impossible to get _two_ clear ideas into them, of the
same thing. We have had lions' heads for door-knockers these hundred and
fifty years, without ever learning so much as what a lion's head is
like. But with good modern stuffing and fetching, I can manage now to
make a child really understand something about the beast's look, and his
mane, and his sullen eyes and brindled lips. But if I'm bothered at the
same time with a big bony box, that has neither mane, lips, nor eyes,
and have to explain to the poor wretch of a parish schoolboy how