In nothing is the want of the intelligent cooperation of the kindred sciences which bear on the study of antiquities more apparent than in the present state of our public collections. The British Museum contains the elements of a collection which, if arranged ethnographically and chronologically, would form the most valuable school of popular instruction that Government could establish; and no other country rests under the same manifest duty to form a complete ethnological museum as Britain: with her hundred colonies, and her tribes of subject aborigines in every quarter of the globe, losing their individuality where they escape extinction, by absorption and assimilation to their European masters. Were an entire quadrangular range of apartments in the British Museum devoted to a continuous systematic arrangement, the visitor should pass from the ethnographic rooms, shewing man as he is still found in the primitive savage state, and destitute of the metallurgic arts; thence to the relics of the Stone Period, not of Britain or Europe only; but also of Asia, Africa, and America, including the remarkable primitive traces which even Egypt discloses. To this would then fitly succeed the old monuments of Egyptian civilisation, the Nimrud marbles, the sculptures of India, and all the other evidences of early Asiatic arts. The Archaic Greek and Colonial works should come after these, followed by the master-pieces of the age of Pericles, and these again by the monuments of imperial Rome. Thus by a natural sequence we return to British remains: the Anglo-Roman relics piecing on like a new chapter of European history, at the point where our island first appears as a part of the old Roman world, and followed in succession by our native Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Norman, and Medieval antiquities. The materials for all this, if we except the primitive British relics, are already acquired; and while to the thousands who annually throng the Museum, in idle and profitless wonder, this would at once convert into intelligible history, what must now be to the vast majority of visitors a confused assortment of nearly meaningless relics, even the most profound scholar might derive from it information and pleasure, such as would amply repay the labour of re-arrangement. The immense practical value of collections to the archæologist renders their proper arrangement a matter of grave importance, and one which cannot be allowed to rest in its present extremely imperfect state.[7]