AND THEIR RELATION TO PROVINCIAL SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. 255
of science are worth acceptance, should they be offered to the direc-
tors of local museums; but isolated specimens from beyond the
bounds of the district should be declined, unless they help to com-
plete the type collections, or are of considerable intrinsic value.
If contributions of all kinds are accepted, and have places
assigned to them in the museum, the certain result will be that it
becomes a repository of rubbish, amidst which may be discovered
only an occasional attempt at arrangement, and here and there
a specimen of value. To one who understands, in some measure,
what a museum may be made, there are few things more depressing
than a visit to such a one as may be too frequently met with in small
towns, where animals of all kinds, stones, weapons, coins, and articles
of furniture are intermixed as they might be in some nightmare, with-
out even the semblance of order or plan in their arrangement. The
fault of such museums is that they have been begun without any
definite plan in the minds of the originators as to what they shall
include, and have been added to omnivorously, everything having
been accepted, however little suited to that already within the room.
The result of this want of system is that, in a comparatively short
time, the space, which may at first have seemed too ample, is
crammed ; and each new acquisition has to be pushed into some
corner, whether among the things to which it is most akin or not.
In a well-planned museum, on the other hand, the precise ob-
jects to which it is to be devoted are sketched out beforehand, and
the due amount of room is assigned to each. No matter though for
a time the space seems too great, and the empty shelves stare at the
visitor with a kind of mute reproach. This is a far more healthy
condition than overcrowding ; and the very fact that they are standing
empty is at once an incentive to the directors of the museum to do their
utmost to have them filled with suitable objects, and to the public to
assist in so filling them. It is, from its commencement, adapted to
serve as a place of instruction to the visitor ; for attention is not
diverted from objects of real value by a crowd of nearly worthless
articles, and even while still very incomplete, the relations of the
various groups, and the plan running through the whole, may be
traced without difficulty. As an excellent example of a well-
organised museum, suitable as a model for almost all provincial towns,
that of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science may be selected for
notice ; and the method followed in its arrangement has been well
described by Dr. Buchanan White, in a series of articles in the