ABSTRACT
The curators of large museums have naturally, and, perhaps, properly, been men more deeply devoted to scientific study than interested in elementary instruction, and they have consequently done what they thought best for the promotion of science by accumulating and exhibiting on the shelves or in the open cases of the museum every specimen which they possess, without considering that by so doing they were overwhelming the general visitor with a mass of unintelligible objects, and at the same time rendering their attentive study by the man of science more difficult and onerous than if they had been brought into a smaller space and in a more available condition. In the Great Exhibition of 1862, Prof. Hyrtl of Vienna exhibited some framed cases of skeletons like those recommended: one contained the types of each family of Tortoises, another the principal forms of Saurians, &c.
