I MUST confess that, at one time, the consideration of the best method of dealing to advantage with the limited space usually existing in the older provincial museums would have dismayed me. Even at that time, however, I had glimmerings of the brighter light which has since illumined the way, and I was, perhaps, aided by the persistent manner in which I haunted museums both abroad and at home, until at last I never went on a journey without managing to break it, or to make it end at the then summum bonum of my happiness — a museum.
Like Diogenes, I went about with my lamp to find, not an honest man, but an honest museum — a museum with some originality, and with some definite idea as to its sphere of work. Leaving out, of course, such complete and technical institutions as the Museum of Geology, the Museum of the College of Surgeons, and such institutions which really have a motive in view — steadfastly adhered to — I saw, then as now, that every provincial museum was nothing if left to its own devices, and, if "inspired," was, at the best, but a sorry and servile imitator of the worst points of our national museum.
Everyone must have observed, no doubt, in any provincial museum which dates back thirty or forty years, that the great curse of the collection, so to speak, is sketchy versatility. In walking through the usually "dry-as-dust" collections you find numbers of very atrociously-rendered mammals, a greater sprinkling of funereal and highly-disreputable birds, some extremely-protracted fishes, some chipped insects, and a lot of shells, chiefly marine, which suggest association with the word "stores." I allude to those odds and ends which people do not want themselves, and which are, therefore, so kindly brought as an offering — would I might say a "burnt" one — to any institution so reckless of consequences as to admit them.
Nearly all museums of early days were imitators of the British Museum, whilst those of later days affect the newer treatment of South Kensington. Hence, in walking through any museum, a technical observer can easily detect the sources of inspiration and the lines of demarcation between the old and the new. Really it amounts to this, that hardly any institution in England thinks for itself. Museum authorities, like sheep, follow the lead of the most ancient bell-wether; and the reason of this is not far to seek. Curators, as a rule, are men with one hobby — "one-horse" men, as the Americans so aptly put it- "sometimes wise, sometimes otherwise," but in many cases totally devoid of that technical education so much needed in reconciling the divergent atoms of the institutions they represent; in fact, head and hand seldom work together.
Often, owing to the want of technical advice, money is wasted in more than one department, cases are too highly paid for, and have not been thought out sufficiently as to their fitness for their future contents, or the position in which they are to be placed, or the more fatal error has been perpetrated of considering them as merely units of a certain department instead of parts of a whole. I contend that if it be necessary for a civil engineer or other professional man to have mastered the various technicalities of his profession, it is also incumbent on curators to have done or to do likewise, in order that they may grasp the treatment of their museum as a whole, and not fall into the grave fault of working up one department whilst ignoring the others.
Nothing is more distasteful to my mind than that a man in the position of a curator should impertinently ride one single hobby to death, to the utter exclusion and detriment of all other branches of knowledge entrusted to his care. What is the sum total of this? In looking around any museum of old standing we see twenty different styles and colours of cases, which may be briefly summarized as representing the eocene, miocene, and pliocene formation of cases; space has been wasted, or not utilized as it might be, and the result is a confused jumble of odds and ends, consequent on some persons considering that the end and aim of a museum should be the preservation of "bullets" collected by "Handy-Andy" from the field of "Arrah-na-Pogue," "My Grandfather's Clock," and so on.
This is certainly not the mission of any museum, nor should it lay itself out with avidity to collect disjointed scraps of savage life, such as portraits of the "ladies" who ate cold savage and who — horresco referens! — "drank his blood." [Footnote: A fact!]
Such a museum object as this, awfully, yet ludicrously, reminds me of that showman who enticed his audience in with — "Here you'll see the Duke of Vellington at the battle of Vauterloo, with the blood all a-runnen down his fut,"' or of poor little "Totty" (in "Helen's Babies"), who loved to hear about "B'liaff" and his headlessness, and the sword that was all "bluggy." This is, I think, one of the mistakes which most museums fall into. They collect a vast quantity of rubbish utterly useless to anyone but a schoolboy or a showman, and in consequence they find valuable space wasted to make way for tops of teapots, bits of leather, Kaffirs' or Zulus' knives made in Sheffield, native ornaments, in beads and brass, made in Birmingham, and such-like members of the great family of "curios." All such as these should be firmly and respectfully declined without thanks. [Footnote: When I first came to the Leicester Museum I was requested to present to the Museum and enclose in a suitable receptacle — No. 1, a piece of thick leather, which the donor thought "just the right thickness for the heel of a boot;" and No. 2 a teapot lid with no particular history, only that — as the dame who brought it phrased it — "maybe it's summat old."]
I have spoken, in somewhat sacrilegious terms, of imitation of the worst points of the old British Museum and of South Kensington (I don't mean the new Natural History Galleries, but artistic South Kensington); but perhaps I may be forgiven when I state that I consider, and always considered, the weakest part of our old natural history galleries at Bloomsbury was the arrangement of all the mammals, birds, etc.., in that provokingly "fore-and-aft" manner (spoken of before), on uninteresting stands or perches (hat-pegs) such as the skeletons in Plates II. and III. are represented on.
This, which was, perhaps, inevitable in a national collection professedly showing to the public every species of bird and mammal in the least possible space, is unpardonable in a provincial museum, which has not the task imposed upon it of attempting to vie with the national collection in point of numbers. Provincial museums, then, if electing to show only animals collected in their immediate vicinity or county (which some authorities--of whom anon — say is the only raison d'être of a provincial museum), or, if electing to supplement these by showing a few foreign forms of striking appearance, fall into grievous error by mounting the necessarily few specimens they can get together on "hat-pegs," simply because the national collection, with which they are not on "all fours," sets them the bad example in this.