This arrangement was continued throughout the remainder of Sir William’s term of office, and was likewise renewed when he was succeeded by Professor E. Ray Lankester, the present holder of the combined posts. This, then, gave Flower, as already stated, the opportunity for which he had so long been waiting; and in January 1896 he undertook the supervision of the reorganisation and rearrangement of the mammal gallery. Here a digression of some length must be made, in order to make the reader acquainted in a certain degree with the conditions then prevalent in the museum in connection with the galleries open to the public. In the first place, as already indicated, while the skins and bones of recent animals were contained and exhibited in the Zoological Department, the remains of their extinct relatives, and even the fossilised bones and teeth of the living species, were relegated to the Geological Department, which occupies the ground floor of the opposite side of the building. To make matters worse, the skeletons of living mammals were exhibited on the second floor of the zoological side of the building (instead of, as they should have been, on the ground floor), and thus as far away as they could possibly be from those of their extinct predecessors. Such an unnatural and illogical sundering of kindred objects was altogether repugnant to the mind of Flower, who in his address to the British Association in 1889, to which allusion has been already made, expressed himself as follows:— “For the perpetuation of the unfortunate separation of palæontology from biology, which is so clearly a survival of an ancient condition of scientific culture, and for the maintenance in its integrity of the heterogeneous compound of sciences which we now call ‘geology,’ the faulty organisation of our museums is in a great measure responsible. The more their rearrangement can be made to overstep and break down the abrupt line of demarcation which is still almost universally drawn between beings which live now and those which have lived in past times, so deeply rooted in the popular mind, and so hard to eradicate even from that of the scientific student, the better it will be for the progress of sound biological knowledge.” The force of circumstances, coupled with the expense which would have been involved, was, however, too much for even a man with Flower’s force of character and determination, and the attempt to merge the palæontological with the zoological collections was consequently perforce abandoned.[2] As a compromise a certain number of fossil specimens, or casts of the same, were to be introduced among the recent mammals; while, conversely, a few skeletons of the latter were to take their place among the remains of their extinct forerunners.