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18 THROUGH NORWAY WITII A KNAPSACK.
of the man’s voice over the house-tops awakens
reminiscences of the East, of the Muezzims calling the
faithful to prayer from the minarets of Constantinople.
The botanical gardens, situated a little way out of
the town, are really what they pretend to be. They
contain specimens of the common wild plants of the
country, growing in the open air, and arranged in the
natural orders. We have plenty of horticultural
gardens in England, where showy flowers are exhibited;
but Ave are sadly in want of gardens where a student
may see examples of common plants so grouped
together as to afford him a general view of the
physiognomy of the orders and genera, such as can scarcely be
obtained by any other means. We call ourselves a
practical people; but in such matters I suspect that our
neighbours generally are far more practical than
ourselves. Our university museums, and even those
connected with the most popular educational institutions,
are almost destitute of educational value; they are for
the most part mere collectors’ and professors’ museums:
collections of rarities and monsters, instead of
microcosms, presenting us with a model of nature as it really
is.* Where, for example, have we a geological museum
* An exception to the above remarks must be made in favour of
the recently opened museums of Soutli Kensington, where the
educational objects I have referred to are kept in view, and in some parts
—such as the trade museum—admirably carried out. Still we have
no museum for the elementary illustration of science, and such a
thing seems to have been scarcely thought of; yet how valuable to
the student of chemistry would be a collection of specimens of all
the elements and all their known compounds: and of some portion, at
least, of the multitude of natural and artificial organic compounds,
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