Upon quitting the Pompeian Court the visitor, still walking southwards, crosses the south transept and enters that division of the building which is devoted to geographical groupings of men, animals, and plants. The illustrations of the animal and vegetable kingdoms in the Crystal Palace have been arranged upon a specific principle and plan. Although the British Museum contains nearly all the examples of animals and birds known in the world, and Kew Gardens exhibit specimens of the majority of trees and plants known to botanists, still neither of these collections affords the visitor any accurate idea of the manner in which these numerous objects are scattered over the earth. Nor do they assist his conjectures as to the nature or the general aspect of their native countries. Here an attempt has been made to remove the confusion; and it is believed that the associations of those two branches of Natural Science, in groupings arranged in such a manner as the nature of the building will permit, coupled with illustrations of the human variety belonging to the same soil (a collection which has never before been attempted in any country), will prove both instructive and amusing, and afford a clearer conception than can be obtained elsewhere of the manner in which the varieties of man, animals, and plants, are distributed over the globe. Zoology (from _Zoön_, an animal) is, strictly speaking, that science which investigates the whole animal kingdom, comprehending man as well as the inferior animals. Zoology, therefore, in a wide sense, includes Ethnology, or so much of that science as considers the different varieties or races of men in a physical point of view, instituting comparisons between them, and carefully pointing out the differences or affinities which characterise the physical structure of various branches of the great human family. In more confined use, the term zoology relates only to the consideration and study of the mammalia, or suckling animals; the requirements of scientific research having occasioned a new nomenclature in order to distinguish the different branches of the same study. Hence the natural history of birds is particularised as Ornithology, and that of fish as Ichthyology, whilst the investigation of those characters in man which serve to distinguish one race from another is, as previously remarked, called Ethnology (from the Greek _Ethnos_, “nation”). This last-named science is subdivided again into different branches, but, in a limited and inferior sense, and as illustrated by the various groups in the Palace, it may be described as that science which distinguishes the differences in skin, hair, bone, and stature that exist between the various races of men. This zoological branch of Ethnology relates to the physical history of man as opposed to his mental history, and, following up the course of his wanderings, endeavours by the above-mentioned physical peculiarities to ascend to