‘Amidst tablets and stones, inscribed with the straight and angular characters of the Runic alphabet, and similar articles which the vulgar might have connected with the exercise of the forbidden arts, ... were disposed, in great order, several of those curious stone axes, formed of green granite, which are often found in these Islands.... There were, moreover, to be seen amid the strange collection stone sacrificial knives ... and the brazen implements called Celts, the purpose of which has troubled the repose of so many antiquaries.’—The Pirate, c. xxviii.
‘A Museum of Antiquities—not of one People or period only, but of all races and all times—exhibits a vast comparative scheme of the material productions of man. We are thus enabled to follow the progress of the Fine and Useful Arts, contemporaneously through a long period of time, tracing their several lines backwards till they converge at one vanishing point of the unknown Past.’—
C. T. Newton (Letter to Col. Mure, 1853).
Scantiness of the Notices of some Contributors to the Natural-History Collections, and its cause.—The Duke of Blacas and his Museum of Greek and Roman Antiquities.—Hugh Cuming and his Travels and Collections in South America.—John Rutter Chorley, and his Collection of Spanish Plays and Spanish Poetry.—George Witt and his Collections illustrative of the History of Obscure Superstitions.—The Ethnographical Museum of Henry Christy, and its History.—Colonial Archæologists and British Consuls: The History of the Woodhouse Collection, and of its transmittal to the British Museum.—Lord Napier and the acquisition of the Abyssinian MSS. added in 1868.—The Travels of Von Siebold in Japan, and the gathering of his Japanese Library.—Felix Slade and his Bequests, Artistic and Archæological.
No reader of this volume will, in the course of its perusal, have become more sensible than is its author of a want of due proportion, in those notices which have occasionally been given of some eminent naturalists who have conspicuously contributed to the public collections, as compared with the notices of those many archæologists and book-gatherers who, in common with the naturalists, have been fellow-workers towards the building up of our National Museum. |The inadequacy of the notices of naturalists in this volume, and its cause.| I feel, too, that my own ignorance of natural history is no excuse at all for so imperfect a filling-out of the plan which the title-page itself of this volume implies. I feel this all the more strongly, because I dissent entirely from those views which tend to depreciate the importance of the scientific collections, in order (very superfluously) to enhance that of the literary and artistic collections. Far from looking at the splendid Galleries of mammals, or of birds, or of plants, as mere collections of ‘book-plates,’ gathered for the ‘illustration’ of the National Library, or from sharing the opinion that the books and the antiquities, alone, are ‘what may be called the permanent departments of the British Museum’ (to quote, literally, the words of a publication[[45]] issued whilst this sheet is going to press, words which seem somewhat rashly—considering whence they come—to prejudge a question of national scope, and one which it assuredly belongs alone to Parliament to settle), I regard these scientific collections as possessing, in common with the others, the highest educational value, and as also possessing, even a little beyond some of the others, a special claim, it may be, upon the respect of Englishmen.
That speciality of claim seems to me to accrue from the fact, that two of the early Founders, and one of the most conspicuous subsequent Benefactors of the Museum, were pre-eminently Naturalists. Such was Courten. Such was Sloane. Such was Sir Joseph Banks. I shall have erred greatly in my estimate of the regard habitually paid by a British Parliament to the memory of the eminent benefactors of Britain, if, in the issue, it do not become apparent that such a consideration as this will weigh heavily with those who will shortly—and after due deliberation and debate—have to decide pending questions in relation to the enlargement and to the still further improvement of the British Museum.
Be that however as it ultimately shall prove to be, if the Public should honour this volume with a favourable reception, it will be its author’s endeavour (in a second edition) to supplement, by the knowledge and co-operation of others, the ignorance and the deficiencies of which he is very conscious in himself.
The formation of the new department of British and Mediæval Antiquities.
In resuming the notices connected with the now truly magnificent Collection of Antiquities, we have to glance at the organizing of a new ‘Department’ in the Museum. During at least two generations it has been, from time to time, remarked—with some surprise as well as censure—that the ‘British’ Museum contained no ‘British’ Antiquities. Sometimes this criticism has been put much too strongly, as when, for example, one of the recent biographers of Wedgwood thus wrote (in 1866, but referring also to a period then ninety years distant). ‘At that date, as at present, everything native to the soil, or produced by the races who had lived and died upon it, was repudiated by those who were the rulers of the National Collection.’ |Meteyard, Life of Josiah Wedgwood, vol. ii, p. 162.| At that time, assuredly, there were already in the Museum a good many British beasts, British birds, and British books;—no inconsiderable part of the ‘productions’ of our soil and of the races born and nurtured upon it.
But, within a few months after the appearance of the criticism I have quoted, all ground for its repetition was removed by the formation of the ‘Department of British and Mediæval Antiquities and Ethnography.’ It is thus organized, in six separate sections:—