I am well aware that there are great practical difficulties in the way of effectual zoological demonstrations.  The dissection of animals is not altogether pleasant, and requires much time; nor is it easy to secure an adequate supply of the needful specimens.  The botanist has here a great advantage; his specimens are easily obtained, are clean and wholesome, and can be dissected in a private house as well as anywhere else; and hence, I believe, the fact, that botany is so much more readily and better taught than its sister science.  But, be it difficult or be it easy, if zoological science is to be properly studied, demonstration, and, consequently, dissection, must be had.  Without it, no man can have a really sound knowledge of animal organization.

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 organize 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 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?