24
ON NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS.
the Raritys, with a method for the ready finding them out."
They were indeed a very miscellaneous collection, including,
according to the catalogue, not only all kinds of animals, plants,
and minerals, but also metals and chemical products, physical
apparatus and models, coins and various antiquities, ethnological
objects, and curios in general. In fact, so august a body as the
Royal Society seems in those days to have regarded a museum
much as Horace Walpole regarded it at a later date, as "A
hospital for everything that is singular."
When the Government granted rooms to the Society no space
was provided for the museum, and consequently on removal from
Gresham College the collections were presented to the newly-
established British Museum. The Royal Society's Museum,
after a life of rather more than a century, ceased to exist as such
in the year 1779.
I am not ambitious enough in this address to attempt
to trace, even in the barest outline, the general history
of museums. Where was the first museum, and who was its
curator, are questions which no man is ever likely to answer.
Reference has often been made to the collections of Aristotle and
other naturalists of classical antiquity, and to the treasures
of Solomon and Hezekiah ; whilst some writers have even been
bold enough to suggest that prehistoric man was not without
his little Museum. Forty years ago M. Dupont discovered in a
limestone cavern on the bank of the river Lasse, in Belgium,
a collection of fossil shells, including the gigantic Cerithium,
which must have been brought a distance of 40 or 50 miles, with
a piece of fluor-spar, and various other objects. Possibly they
were brought together as mysterious objects for worship, or per-
haps only as personal decorations ; but the late Mr. G. H. Morton,
of Liverpool, thought it more likely that they were collected as
mere curiosities—prehistoric curios.25
As practical people, however, it is more to our present
purpose to utilize the brief time at our disposal in dealing with
the museums of our own country, in comparatively modern
times.
At the time the Royal Society founded its Museum, the only
collection of importance in this country seems to have been that
25 "Museums of the Past, the Present, and the Future." Proc. Liverpool Nat. Field
Club lor 1893.