Two different systems of that ‘classification, which defines the margin of our ignorance,’ are adopted by museums; and, consequently, by the catalogues describing them. I shall here quote only English collections, leaving to the Continental reader the task of applying the two main principles locally and generally. These are, first, the Topical or Geographical (_e.g._ Christy collection), which, as the words denote, examines the article itself mainly with reference to its media, nature and culture, place and date; and which considers man and his works as the expression of the soil that bears him. The second is the Material and purely Formal (General A. Pitt-Rivers’ collection), which regards only the objects or specimens themselves, without respect to their makers or their media; and which, by investigating the rival laws of continuity and of incessant variation, aims at extending our knowledge of mankind. Both plans have their merits and their demerits. The Topical is the more strictly anthropologico-ethnological, because it makes the general racial culture its prominent feature; but it fails to illustrate, by juxtaposition, the origin, the life, and the death of a special article. The Formal proposes to itself the study of specific ideas; it describes their transmissions and their migrations; and it displays their connection and sequence, their development and degradation. It exemplifies the law of unconscious selection, as opposed to premeditation and design. Thus it claims superior sociological interest, while it somewhat separates and isolates the article from its surroundings—mankind. Again, it would be unadvisable to neglect the chronological and synchronological order (Demmin’s). This assists us in tracing with a surer hand the origin and derivation; the annals, the adventures, and the accidents of an almost universal weapon, whose marvellously chequered career excels in dignity, in poetry, and in romance, anything and everything the world has yet seen. And here I have not been unmindful of Dr. Arthur Mitchell’s sensible warning that ‘the rude form of an implement may follow as well as precede the more finished forms.’[2] Due regard to dates enables us to avoid the scandalous confusion of the vulgar museum. Demmin found a large number of swords catalogued as dating with the time of Charles the Bold, when the shapes proved that they belonged to the late sixteenth and even to the early seventeenth centuries. I was shown, in the museum of Aquileja, a ‘Roman sword’ which was a basket-hilted Venetian, hardly two hundred years old. It is only an exact chronology, made to frame the Geographical and the Formal pictures of the weapon, that can secure scientific distribution.