public, and a closer association with University Extension and Gilchrist and other lectures, are very much needed. Saturday afternoon in the British Museum is a melancholy spectacle of wasted wealth. A small model museum, designed solely for the education of the general public, would be more useful in this respect than our magnificent national museum. Unfortunately, the small museums copy the academic defects of the larger. The curator of one, on whom I urged the needs of the public, replied wearily: “Well, it will take me three years to arrange my Cephalopods, and then I will see what I can do.”
We need a comprehensive and serious organisation and development of our resources for educating the adult. Our Education Department needs to throw out a new wing with the purpose of preventing the utter waste of its work upon young children. Institutions like the British Museum ought to be relieved of the control of the Archbishop of Canterbury and one or two other somnolent gentlemen, and made the centre of a splendid and energetic system of popular instruction and stimulation. From such centres the educational officials (as distinct from learned curators and youths from Oxford and Cambridge who look upon the public as a nuisance) might issue attractive invitations and publications, and be prepared to welcome the non-student, either with “showmen” who understand the public mind or by a general and affable accessibility of the whole staff. Municipal
