‘A Museum of Antiquities—not of one People or period only, but of all races and all times—exhibits a vast comparative scheme of the material productions of man. We are thus enabled to follow the progress of the Fine and Useful Arts, contemporaneously through a long period of time, tracing their several lines backwards till they converge at one vanishing point of the unknown Past.’— C. T. NEWTON (_Letter to Col. Mure_, 1853). _Scantiness of the Notices of some Contributors to the Natural-History Collections, and its cause.—The Duke of_ BLACAS _and his Museum of Greek and Roman Antiquities.—Hugh_ CUMING _and his Travels and Collections in South America.—John_ RUTTER CHORLEY, _and his Collection of Spanish Plays and Spanish Poetry.—George_ WITT _and his Collections illustrative of the History of Obscure Superstitions.—The Ethnographical Museum of Henry_ CHRISTY, _and its History.—Colonial Archæologists and British Consuls: The History of the_ WOODHOUSE _Collection, and of its transmittal to the British Museum.—Lord_ NAPIER _and the acquisition of the Abyssinian MSS. added in 1868.—The Travels of_ VON SIEBOLD _in Japan, and the gathering of his Japanese Library.—Felix_ SLADE _and his Bequests, Artistic and Archæological_. No reader of this volume will, in the course of its perusal, have become more sensible than is its author of a want of due _proportion_, in those notices which have occasionally been given of some eminent naturalists who have conspicuously contributed to the public collections, as compared with the notices of those many archæologists and book-gatherers who, in common with the naturalists, have been fellow-workers towards the building up of our National Museum. [Sidenote: THE INADEQUACY OF THE NOTICES OF NATURALISTS IN THIS VOLUME, AND ITS CAUSE.] I feel, too, that my own ignorance of natural history is no excuse at all for so imperfect a filling-out of the plan which the title-page itself of this volume implies. I feel this all the more strongly, because I dissent entirely from those views which tend to depreciate the importance of the scientific collections, in order (very superfluously) to enhance that of the literary and artistic collections. Far from looking at the splendid Galleries of mammals, or of birds, or of plants, as mere collections of ‘book-plates,’ gathered for the ‘illustration’ of the National Library, or from sharing the opinion that the books and the antiquities, alone, are ‘what may be called the permanent departments of the British Museum’ (to quote, literally, the words of a publication[45] issued whilst this sheet is going to press, words which seem somewhat rashly—considering whence they come—to prejudge a question of national scope, and one which it assuredly belongs alone _to Parliament_ to settle), I regard these scientific collections as possessing, in common with the others, the