So long ago as the year 1859, Sir Richard Owen, in one of his reports to the Trustees of the Museum, recommended that the new building, in addition to affording ample space for the general series of natural specimens exhibited to the public, should likewise include a hall, or other suitable apartment, for the display of a series of specimens calculated to convey an elementary idea of the general principles of systematic natural history and biological classification to the large proportion of the ordinary public visitor not conversant with that subject. In other words, the feature of the proposed section would be the exhibition of a series of specimens selected to show the more typical characters of the principal groups of organised (and, it was at the time added, crystallised) forms. This, it was urged, would constitute an epitome of natural history, and would convey to the eye, in the easiest and most ready manner, an elementary knowledge of the sciences in question. In every modification which the plans of the new building underwent, a hall for the purpose indicated in the above passages formed, as Sir William has himself remarked, a prominent feature; being in the later stages of the development of the building called, for want of a better name, the “Index Museum.” The increasing infirmities of age, coupled with the short time during which he presided over the Natural History collections in their new home, combined, however, to prevent Owen from making any real progress with the so-called Index Museum; and although he furnished the idea of the scheme and planned the general installation of the hall, the selection and installation of its contents were left to his successor. And, with the vast experience gained by Sir William during his tenure of office in the Royal College of Surgeons, they could not possibly have been left to abler hands. Here it is necessary to explain that, whether by design or by accident, history sayeth not, the Index Museum and the Central Hall generally were not included in any one of the four great administrative departments of the Museum, so that they consequently came under the immediate and exclusive control of the Director himself. Nor was Flower long in setting to work at the task which thus lay awaiting his master-hand; and the Index Museum, as fast as the exigencies of finance and the difficulties of procuring suitable specimens permitted, gradually assumed the shape and character familiar to all visitors of the building, not that in these respects it exactly followed the lines suggested by Owen. In place of being, as was originally proposed, a sort of epitome or index of the main collections in the galleries, it developed rather into something “more like the general introduction preceding the systematic portion of treatises on any branch of natural history.”