After an elaborate inquiry, spreading over three months, the Committee reported thus:—‘The witnesses examined have, almost unanimously, testified to the preference over the other Collections, with which the Natural-History Collections are viewed by the ordinary and most numerous frequenters of the Museum. This preference is easily accounted for; the objects exhibited, especially the birds, from the beauty of their plumage, are calculated to attract and amuse the spectators. [Sidenote: THE SELECT COMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS, 1860.] The eye has been accustomed in many instances to the living specimens in the Zoological Gardens, and cheap publications and prints have rendered their forms more or less familiar. It is, indeed, easily intelligible that, while for the full appreciation of works of archæological interest and artistic excellence a special education must be necessary, the works of Nature may be studied with interest and instruction by all persons of ordinary intelligence. It appears, from evidence, that many of the middle classes are in the habit of forming collections in various branches of Natural History, and that many, even the working classes, employ their holidays in the study of botany or geology, or in the collection of insects obtained in the neighbourhood of London; that they refer to the British Museum, in order to ascertain the proper classification of the specimens thus obtained, and that want of leisure alone restrains the further increase of this class of visitors. Your Committee, in order to confirm their view of the peculiar popularity of the Natural-History Collections, beg to refer to a return from the Principal-Librarian, which shows the number of visitors in the several public portions of the Museum, at the same hour of the day, during fifteen open days, from the fifteenth of June to the eleventh of July, 1860. From this it appears that two thousand five hundred and fifty-seven persons were in the Galleries of Antiquities at the given hour, and one thousand and fifty-six in the King’s Library and MSS. Rooms, while three thousand three hundred and seventy-eight were in the Natural-History Galleries; showing an excess of two hundred and twenty per cent. in the Natural-History Department over the King’s Library and MSS. Rooms, and of thirty-three per cent. over the Galleries of Antiquities, notwithstanding that the latter are of considerably greater extent than the Galleries of Natural History. The evidence received by your Committee induces the belief that the removal of these most popular collections from their present central position to one less generally accessible would excite much dissatisfaction, not merely among a large portion of the inhabitants of the metropolis, but among the numerous inhabitants of the country, who from time to time visit London by railway, and to whom the proximity of the British Museum to most of the railway termini, as compared with the distance of the localities to