AS CONSERVATOR OF THE MUSEUM OF THE COLLEGE OF SURGEONS, AND HUNTERIAN PROFESSOR 31 CHAPTER III AS DIRECTOR OF THE NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM 57 CHAPTER IV AS PRESIDENT OF THE ZOOLOGICAL SOCIETY 89 CHAPTER V GENERAL ZOOLOGICAL WORK 95 CHAPTER VI WORK ON THE CETACEA 139 CHAPTER VII ANTHROPOLOGICAL WORK 153 CHAPTER VIII MUSEUM AND MISCELLANEOUS WORK 169 APPENDIX (LIST OF BOOKS AND MEMOIRS) 179 Life of Flower CHAPTER I GENERAL SKETCH OF FLOWER’S LIFE Born on 30th November 1831 at his father’s house, “The Hill,” Stratford-on-Avon, William Henry Flower was a man who had the rare good fortune not only to make a profession of the pursuit he loved best, but likewise to attain the highest possible success in, and to be appointed to the most important and influential post connected with that profession. As he tells us in that delightful book, _Essays on Museums_, he was pleased to designate as a “museum” when a boy at home a miscellaneous collection of natural history objects, kept at first in a cardboard box, but subsequently housed in a cupboard. And as a man he became the respected head of the greatest Natural History Museum in the British Empire, if not indeed in the whole world. Very significant of his future attention to details and of the importance he attached to recording the history of every specimen received in a museum, is the fact that he compiled a carefully drawn-up catalogue of his first boyish collection. This early and persistent taste for natural history was not, as we learn from the same collection of essays, inherited from any member of either his father’s or his mother’s family, but appears to have been an “idiopathic” development. His isolated position in this respect may, perhaps, have caused Flower in later life to notice more specially than might otherwise have been the case, how comparatively rare is the development of an ingrained taste for natural history among the adult members of the British nation. This idea was exemplified by his remarking on one occasion to the present writer that he often wondered how many persons out of every thousand he passed casually in the street, or met in social intercourse, had the slightest sympathy with, or took any real interest in the subjects which formed his own favourite pursuits and lines of thought.