Abstract
THE imminent retirement of Sir William Flower after his long and extremely efficient service as Director of the Natural History Museum, is an event of very serious importance to the progress of natural science in England. At one time the national collection, like any little country museum, was a jumble of curiosities and antiquities, the stray result of capricious generosity. As knowledge grew, the various departments became specialised, and in the middle Victorian period, thanks to the prescience of Owen, and the active interest of the Prince Consort, a prodigious dichotomy was effected. The collections relating to what are called by a well-known if illogical term, the Natural Sciences, were separated from the sculptures of Assyria and Greece, from the papyri and coins, the remains of the arts and manufactures of earlier civilisations, and were lodged in the magnificent palace in South Kensington. They were placed under the care of a small army of specialists—zoological, botanical, geological and mineralogical—and these were directed by a single controlling general, directly responsible to the nation through the Trustees and the Treasury. The great abilities of Owen, and the coordinating genius of Sir William Flower, rapidly made the British Museum, of Natural History an institution of world-wide importance. Scientific men from provincial England, from Scotland and Ireland, from the Colonies and from other nations, came to regard it more and more as the greatest of centres for the elaboration of all knowledge in natural science depending on the presence, classification, and display of material specimens. As the reputation of the Museum has grown, so also has grown the work done and to be done in it. Collectors from all parts of the world lavish on it or offer to it for sale the best of their specimens; naturalists bequeath to its care their treasured collections from a thousand sources, and so material for scientific work accumulates. The members of the staff become specialists of extraordinary knowledge; many of them, junior and senior, are experts of European reputation in their own departments. Among all the activities of our great nation, the scientific activity of the Natural History Museum takes a great and increasingly great place.
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The National Museum of Natural History. Nature 58, 227–228 (1898). https://doi.org/10.1038/058227a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/058227a0