GENERAL DESCRIPTION.

On passing the gate of the museum in Great Russell Street, the visitor enters a large open court, and sees before him the southern or principal front of the museum-a handsome façade, 370 feet wide, and 66 feet high, consisting of a portico and two projecting wings, faced by a colonnade. This façade and the other three sides of the building, which are not seen from the courtyard, constitute a quadrangle of great extent. The exterior architecture of the whole is of the Ionic order; and the general effect, which is already very pleasing, will be enhanced when the sculptural decorations of the portico are complete.

Having ascended the wide steps of the portico, one passes through a great door of carved oak into a noble and lofty entrance hall, finely paved with Portland stone and gray marble, and having a beautifully-ornamented ceiling. Here the visitor usually lingers a little while to observe the effect more carefully, as well as to examine three marble statues that are in it :—a statue of the Honourable Mrs Damer-a lady of some celebrity as a sculptor, who died in 1763; a statue by Chantrey of the distinguished naturalist Sir Joseph Banks; and an ideal representation of Shakspeare, in a thoughtful attitude, by Roubillac, a French sculptor of note, resident in England about the middle of last century. This last was bequeathed to the museum by Garrick, who had purchased it. It is familiar to the public through the engravings that have been made from it, and although the conception is somewhat poor for the subject, the appearance of the statue is extremely elegant and graceful.

Quitting the entrance-hall, the visitor should ascend the great staircase on the left, with the beauty of which, and especially with the rich effect of the polished red granite which lines the walls, he cannot fail to be struck. This staircase ascended, the visitor is suddenly made aware, by the sight of two immense Giraffes immediately in front of him, with other stuffed animals all round, that he has fairly crossed the threshold of the museum. Left to himself, he would wander from this room (the central saloon) into the others as chance might direct; for neither are the rooms so arranged as to compel the visitor to follow a certain route, nor do the authorised catalogues point out any order in which the

rooms should be visited. Upon the whole, it is best that it should be so, and that visitors should be permitted to move about freely as they choose; but it will serve the purposes of this digest better, if we adopt some classification of the contents of the museum, and take the several apartments one by one in a corresponding order. Readers who may use the volume as a guide-book, would do better to conform to this arrangement; and should they have time for several visits, it might not be disadvantageous, after the first cursory examination of the whole museum, to employ the remaining visits in more minutely inspecting the respective departments.

A great part of the contents of the museum may be comprehended under three heads:-I. Miscellaneous Antiquities and Curiosities, illustrating the manners and customs of ancient and foreign peoples, constituting what may be called the Ethnographical Department. II. Objects of Natural History-namely, Minerals and Fossils, Plants and Animals—constituting the Natural History Department. And, III. Works of Art, chiefly sculptures, illustrating the genius and higher mental efforts of a few illustrious nations of past times. If to these three departments we add a fourth, including the Library, the Prints, the Medals, and the Portraits, we shall exhaust the contents of the museum.

This classification is by no means accurate. Although, for instance, there is an evident distinction between those mere antiquities, such as lamps, axe-heads, or articles of furniture, which only illustrate the manners and customs of the ancients, and those works of art, such as statues and paintings, which illustrate the tendencies of their minds when making a high effort through their individual men of genius, yet in point of fact it is impossible to draw the line of separation, or to say which articles in any collection of antiquities are mere curiosities, and which are works of art. Strictly considered, also, works of art possess the same ethnographical value-that is, the same power of admitting us to a view of the life of the people that produced them as mere curiosities. Nor is it necessary to point out that, in reserving the library, the prints, the medals, and the portraits, to form a fourth, or supplementary department, we proceed on a mere reason of convenience-prints and portraits belonging strictly to the department of Art, and medals to that of Ethnography. The classification, nevertheless, will be found to possess very considerable advantages for the purpose in view.

As in the classification itself strict scientific accuracy has been sacrificed to convenience, so, in arranging the different rooms of the museum to correspond with that classification, convenience must again be the standard. In some of the rooms devoted to the

reception of antiquities, the articles are so multifarious, being arranged more according to their size than their nature, as to belong one half to the Ethnographical department, and the other half to the department of Art. All things considered, however, the following arrangement will be found liable to the fewest objections:

I. THE ETHNOGRAPHICAL DEPARTMENT, including the apartments thus named in the authorised catalogue:-1. The Ethnographical Room; 2. The Egyptian Room; 3. The Bronze Room; and 4. The Etruscan Room; all of which are on the upper floor, the Ethnographical Room in a corner by itself, close to the great staircase, and the other three contiguous, in another part of the building.

II. THE NATURAL HISTORY DEPARTMENT, also on the upper floor, and including, 1. The Central Saloon; 2. The Mammalia Saloon; 3. The Southern Zoological Gallery; 4. The Eastern Zoological Gallery; 5. The Northern Zoological Gallery (Five Rooms); and, 6. The North Gallery, devoted to Mineralogy and Geology.

III. THE DEPARTMENT OF SCULPTURES, all on the groundfloor, and including, 1. Room I.; 2. The Lycian Room; 3. The Temporary Passage; 4. The Grand Central Saloon; 5. The Phigalian Saloon; 6. The Elgin Saloon; and, 7. The Egyptian Saloon.

IV. THE LIBRARY, together with the Print-Room, the MedalRoom, and the collection of portraits hung in the Eastern Zoological Gallery.

ETHNOGRAPHICAL DEPARTMENT.

1.-ETHNOGRAPHICAL ROOM.

Turning aside from the Central Saloon, which is the first entered from the great staircase, the visitor will find the Ethnographical Room, an oblong apartment of considerable size, though much too small for its purpose, which is the collection of articles illustrative of the manners and customs of nations lying at a distance from our own, as well as of rude ancient races. A few of the bulkier articles are placed on the floor in the middle of the apartment, but the greater proportion are ranged in glass-covered cases or presses round the walls; each nation being assigned one or more cases, according to its importance, or rather according to the number of articles relating to it.

How meagre, upon the whole, this portion of the museum is, may be judged of from the fact, that to the great nations of China and Japan, so interesting to us as presenting a civilisation in some respects as advanced as our own, although of a singularly distinct kind, all that can be assigned are five paltry cases, containing a few figures of gods, musical instruments, &c. Supposing the miscellaneous articles-flutes, watches, snuff-boxes, &c.—that lie exposed in a single window of any London pawnbroker's shop to be carried to any of the inland cities of China, and there exhibited in a museum, the assistance they would give to a Chinese in forming an idea of British life would be about as great as that which the British Museum affords to Londoners for the study of life in China. But in a national repository one looks for something like completeness; nor would it be difficult to have in the museum separate rooms for the greater nations, such as the Chinese and the Indians, regarding whom our conceptions may already be tolerably complete, leaving the Ethnographical room for the mere temporary reception of miscellaneous curiosities pertaining to those minor races of whose customs we are comparatively ignorant.

At the same time, one advantage arises from the assemblage of so many heterogeneous articles in the same room-that of being able to compare the general tastes and apparent character of the several nations whose productions are thus brought into juxtaposition. Commencing at the door, and following his right hand, the visitor of the Ethnographical room, inspecting the cases in

their order, is obliged to pass from China (Cases I-V) to India (Cases VI-IX), and on in succession to Africa (Cases X-XII); the different regions of native North America (Cases XIV-XXX), the different regions of South America (Cases XXXI-XXXVII), thence by a sudden leap backward in time to Ancient Britain and Gaul (Cases XXXVII-L), and again forward to the South Sea Islands and the vast regions of Australasia (Cases L-LXXIV). At first the eye is simply confused by this succession of spearheads, rings, feathers, and cloths, brought from all parts of the earth's surface, and from different points, so to speak, in the darkness of the past; but, by looking long and attentively, one begins to discern differences in the different compartments, and to see what it is that is specially Chinese in the Chinese compartment, what specially Indian in the Indian, and wherein the African compartment differs from either.

A mere glance at the articles in the Chinese cases (Cases I-V) would convince a person of observation that they come from a highly-civilised country. Not to mention spears, bows, and arrows, and such-like articles, which even comparative savages possess, we have here a pair of native spectacles in a shagreen leathern case, a shoe-horn with shoe-brushes attached to it; a viatorium, or traveller's guide, consisting of a mariner's compass and portable sundial for the pocket; a Chinese bank-note; a swan-pan, or abacus, an ingenious instrument (also known to the Romans) for assisting in computation; and many other contrivances which none but a highlycultivated people could require or think of. Yet with such evidences of Chinese ingenuity and skill before us, there are probably few persons in Europe who have formed a just estimate of the Chinese, so difficult is it to infer the condition and character of a people from mere hand-specimens of their manufactures brought over the seas, and huddled together on a few shelves. That they are a population of corpulent and clever barbarians, who wear pig-tails, make tea and porcelain, bandage the feet of their women, and carve neatly, and with effect (see next page), in ivory, is the common conception of them; and this, notwithstanding the numerous books that have been written to give us truer ideas of themselves and their country. The Chinese, these books tell us, are a vast nation of some 300,000,000 of souls (nearly a third part of the whole human race,) inhabiting a country the area of which is about 1,200,000 square miles, or onethird that of Europe. For a country of this area to accommodate

Chinese Abacus.