A good deal may be done, however, without actual dissection on the student’s part, by demonstration upon specimens and preparations; and in all probability it would not be very difficult, were the demand sufficient, to organise collections of such objects, sufficient for all the purposes of elementary teaching, at a comparatively cheap rate.  Even without these, much might be effected, if the zoological collections, which are open to the public, were arranged according to what has been termed the “typical principle”; that is to say, if the specimens exposed to public view were so selected that the public could learn something from them, instead of being, as at present, merely confused by their multiplicity.  For example, the grand ornithological gallery at the British Museum contains between two and three thousand species of birds, and sometimes five or six specimens of a species.  They are very pretty to look at, and some of the cases are, indeed, splendid; but I will undertake to say, that no man but a professed ornithologist has ever gathered much information from the collection.  Certainly, no one of the tens of thousands of the general public who have walked through that gallery ever knew more about the essential peculiarities of birds when he left the gallery than when he entered it.  But if, somewhere in that vast hall, there were a few preparations, exemplifying the leading structural peculiarities and the mode of development of a common fowl; if the types of the genera, the leading modifications in the skeleton, in the plumage at various ages, in the mode of nidification, and the like, among birds, were displayed; and if the other specimens were put away in a place where the men of science, to whom they are alone useful, could have free access to them, I can conceive that this collection might become a great instrument of scientific education.

The last implement of the teacher to which I have adverted is examination—­a means of education now so thoroughly understood that I need hardly enlarge upon it.  I hold that both written and oral examinations are indispensable, and, by requiring the description of specimens, they may be made to supplement demonstration.

Such is the fullest reply the time at my disposal will allow me to give to the question—­how may a knowledge of zoology be best acquired and communicated?

But there is a previous question which may be moved, and which, in fact, I know many are inclined to move.  It is the question, why should teachers be encouraged to acquire a knowledge of this, or any other branch of physical science?  What is the use, it is said, of attempting to make physical science a branch of primary education?  Is it not probable that teachers, in pursuing such studies, will be led astray from the acquirement of more important but less attractive knowledge?  And, even if they can learn something of science without prejudice to their usefulness, what is the good of their attempting to instil that knowledge into boys whose real business is the acquisition of reading, writing, and arithmetic?