Such a museum, if residents who are interested in these sciences take proper pains, may be brought to a great degree of perfection and be unique of its kind.  It will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance.  Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindoo idols, sharks’ teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells—­who shall describe the weary inutility of it?  It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of science elsewhere than under their noses.  What they want to know is that their “America is here,” as Wilhelm Meister has it.

Yours faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

Alfred Walker, Esq., Nant-y-Glyn, Colwyn Bay.

To the reverend P. Brodie of Warwick.

Jermyn Street, October 14, 1859.

My dear Mr. Brodie,

I am sorry to say that I can as yet send you no catalogue of ours.  The remodelling of our museum is only just completed, and only the introductory part of my catalogue is written.  When it is printed you shall have an early copy.

If I may make a suggestion I should say that a catalogue of your museum for popular use should commence with a sketch of the topography and stratigraphy of the county, put into the most intelligible language, and illustrated by reference to mineral specimens in the cases, and to the localities where sections showing the superposition of such and such beds is to be seen.  After that I think should come a list of the most remarkable and interesting fossils, with reference to the cases where they are to be seen; and under the head of each a brief popular account of the kind of animal or plant which the thing was when alive, its probable habits, and its meaning and importance as a member of the great series of successive forms of life.

Yours very faithfully,

T.H.  Huxley.

[The reorganisation of the course of studies at Jermyn Street, fully sketched out in the 1857 notebook, involved two very serious additions to his work over and above what was required of him by his appointment as Professor.  He found his students to a great extent lacking in the knowledge of general principles necessary to the comprehension of the special work before them.  To enable them to make the best use of his regular lectures, he offered them in addition a preliminary evening course of nine lectures each January, which he entitled “An Introduction to the Study of the Collection of Fossils in the Museum of Practical Geology.”  These lectures summed up what he afterwards named Physiography, together with a general sketch of fossils and their nature, the classification of animals and plants, their distribution at various epochs, and the principles on which they are constructed, illustrated by the examination of some animal, such as a lobster.