WITH the growing popularity of South Kensington Museum the directors and curators of its priceless collections have increased their efforts to adapt some of the accumulated store of knowledge which those collections represent to popular comprehension. The results of this activity have of late become manifest, both in the great Central Hall, and in the incomparable collection of British birds. The birds, which have been for many years a dull assemblage of specimens, all stuffed alike, and bearing an unnatural common resemblance to one another, are being rearranged in cases with a proper environment of rocks and shrub, sandhill or marsh; and with a skillful and successful attempt to display them in their habitat as they live.

The work is not nearly complete; it will hardly be so for two years to come; but already some of the cases, especially those of the solan geese, the eagles, the cormorants, and the almost vanished British bustard, are most interesting and beautiful object lessons in natural history. A lesson of a different kind is being begun in the Central Hall. During the period of Sir William Flower's directorship a number of specimens of canaries, pigeons, and domestic fowl were collected, and it was sought to show by means of these the variations which breeding might produce on a single type. Two cases of these specimens now stand in the Central Hall. On the top of the "pigeon exhibit" is the common rock pigeon. Below him, tier upon tier, are ranged the carriers, tumblers, pouters—the thirty odd breeds which fanciers have produced from the original ancestors. Many of these specimens were prize-winners in their day.

The same distinction appertains to the twenty or thirty varieties of canary, which are in an adjoining case, and which are the descendants of some ancestors whose little wings were not bright yellow at all, but a dull brownish green. The domestic fowl in the same case are intended to exhibit similar artificial peculiarities, though it should be noted that the nine-feet-long tails of the Japanese bantam are not so much the result of breeding as of eccentric cultivation, for the unfortunate bird's feathers are carefully trained in this way throughout the whole of an uncomfortable life. But the lesson in evolution which these cases seek to convey is to be carried out on a much larger scale. At the further end of the Central Hall are to be ranged a number of specimens of dogs, cows, goats, horses, cats, every species, in fact, of which mankind has produced definite breeds. Even fish, bees, silk-moths, and the greatly modified native oyster will find representation here. The nucleus of the dog collection has already been formed, and includes a mastiff of the old English breed, heads of the Irish wolf hound, Danish and French mastiffs, Russian and Mexican lap dogs, remarkable for their smallness, and Fullerton, the famous coursing greyhound. Numerous skulls, and several mummied dogs, given by Professor Flinders Petrie, will add to the interest of this collection. The authorities hope that persons who lose pure-bred or prize animals by death will present their bodies to the museum in order that they may be added to this extremely interesting display.