NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.
Sir William Flower in this volume has collected and published most of the principal essays and addresses which he has from time to time written or delivered on Zoological—including Anthropological—subjects, and which from their non-technical character appeal not only to naturalists but also to the usual cultured reader. There is always a danger that the special element of a man's great success may prove a cloud which serves to obscure his other qualities. We are so apt to think and read of the author as the greatest of contemporary Museum Directors, that we are liable to overlook the fact that his influence on Zoology has been exercised over a wider field, and that his services to Anthropology in England have been of a signal character.
The first seven chapters or essays are altogether devoted to "Museums," a subject which to the general public would probably be thought threadbare, by the rank and file of ordinary curators has been canonised and fossilised, and which is now in its renaissance both in Europe and America, with potentialities for instruction which democracies have hardly yet suspected, and which in time they will very heartily support. The Museum of the future must serve two purposes; not only must it prove the temple for scientific study and research, by vast accumulation of specimens, and not by a limitation to examples as in a Noachian collection; but it must be made to attract and instruct our general humanity in the secrets and charms of the animal life to which it belongs, of that which has preceded its era, and of that which has vanished and is still vanishing from its contact. The time is past when the wretched holiday seeker, uninstructed in zoology, unassisted by state-paid instructors or guides, wanders his weary way past miles of glass cases crammed with stuffed skins, and
