Every department of this university is being energetically overhauled and rearranged, so that it may be quite up to date, but a melancholy mistake made by the architect in planning the Natural History Museum cannot, unfortunately, be rectified. Wishing to give plenty of room for the cases containing stuffed animals, birds, and such like, he built it in a square, with an open space reaching from the ground floor to the roof of the building, and covered the walls with glass cases which could be reached by two spiral iron staircases, and a gallery running round on a level with each floor. The result is that the glass cases not immediately on a level with the galleries are utterly useless, for they cannot be reached without the help of a long ladder and a climb to a dizzy height! The student who could study specimens under these difficulties must be endowed with considerable nerve. To walk round the top gallery and look down was enough to make me feel giddy. I found Professor Varela, a naturalist newly arrived from Madrid, busy rearranging the specimens. He was a comparative stranger to Galicia, and had a hard task before him. I pitied him for having such a stupidly constructed museum, and wondered how he would eventually utilise all those inaccessible glass cases. Professor Varela showed me a valuable collection of the many kinds of wood to be found in Galicia, but lamented over the ridiculous mistake that had been made in polishing and varnishing each block, instead of leaving them in their natural state. He also attracted my attention to an interesting collection of skulls from Mindanao, the largest of the Philippine Islands, which he was engaged in measuring. He had already discovered that they belonged to two distinct races: his measuring instrument was a simple compass, which he preferred to any of the recent inventions. He spoke of the wonderful influence that climate has upon the shape of the human skull, and of the short time it had taken for the skulls of Anglo-Saxons of North America to become quite different from that of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. Professor Varela hopes eventually to devote a large section of his museum to local specimens.