8 ON NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS.
whose guidance we may be sure that the birds will receive due
attention. It is also intended, our purse permitting, to erect a
case in the middle of the Oak Room, on the lower floor, with a
collection of the small Mammals of the Forest, showing their
natural environment. At present the Forest mammals are
represented only by a few examples of heads and antlers of the
fallow deer, the red deer, and the roe deer—with one stuffed
specimen of the forest breed of fallow deer.
In the picturesque mounting of natural objects, we cannot
hope to imitate the splendid groups in the British Museum
(Natural History), or even to vie with those of the large Pro-
vincial Museums, such as the fine pictorial groups by Mr.
Montagu Browne, at Leicester. But even in a small way, we
may be able to invest our stuffed birds and mammals with a touch
of living interest. Instead of mounting them in the time-
honoured fashion on polished pedestals of wood, we may at least
encircle them with something suggestive of their forest-sur-
roundings. The realistic adjuncts of a "habitat group" appeal
especially to the young visitor ; and a young visitor is always
worth attracting.
Although the pictorial mounting of natural history objects has
been brought prominently forward in recent years, it is by no means
a new thing in Museums. In the early years of the last century,
there existed at the Egyptian Hall, in Piccadilly, in connection
with Bullock's famous Museum, an exhibition called the
Pantherion. The conception was much too ambitious, since it
aimed at representing, as far as possible, the whole of the
mammalia, but its merit and novelty lay in the attempt to convey,
in the words of its projector, "a more perfect idea of their haunts
and mode of life than has hitherto been done.''(7)
By means of a tropical scene, with models of appropriate
vegetation, such creatures as the lion, the elephant, the rhinoceros,
and the giraffe were "exhibited as ranging in their native wilds and
forest." With regard to our unambitious Museum at Chingford,
it seems in the highest degree desirable that we should be able
to set up without further delay a few groups of local birds and
mammals, under conditions suggestive of a glimpse of wild
nature in Epping Forest. Nature-study is making us now-a-days
(7) A Companion to the London Museum and Pantherion. By William Bullock,
London. 1816 (17th Ed.) p. 97.