Our Museums And Art Galleries.

of the National gallery and the Museums . We avail ourselves of our own extended but unpublished notes as foundation for what Ave may have to say . Mr . Layard submitted several questions to the meeting . He grouped them under four heads .

They related to opening the British Museum , and implied the other collections , on Sundays , to the opening at nights , to the proposed separation of the natural history collections of the British Museum from the art and archaeological collections and the library , to the interval that should be left

between the period of one local industrial exhibition and another , and to the locality for the museum UOAV at South Kensington , and to the maintenance of a distinctive character in that museum as a

museum of art . In his opening remarks , however , he placed the questions more clearly in order than they Avere stated in the conclusion of his address . He endeavoured to show that there Avere three classes of

subjects to be provided for by museums and galleries , in London , Avhich should demand as many separate kinds of buildings . The British Museum he would devote archa 3 ology and art historically considered , or to the history of man ' s development . Natural history and science , or the

illustration of the Avorld ' s development , as totally distinct from the other , he AA ^ ould locate elsewhere . The South Kensington Museum he would , as we understood , devote to the arts applied . The British Museum was already too A * ast for logical accuracy ; the works of the National Gallery , and

those in the British Museum should be together : and eventually no building would suffice for all the objects . Now Ave may sa , y , it is much easier to admit difficulty of a sufficient extension of the area of the British Museum , than to accept the distinction here pronounced as existing between nature and science on the one hand and art on the

other . Art is indeed man's work ; but applied art , though distinct from nature , is founded u 2 ion the latter , and fashioned out of the materials of it : moreover , art conies into form by making use of science . Our special art , and all the family of arts belonging to the fittiug and furnishing of

buildings , as well as those belonging to personal adornment , have their very existence so much in relation Avith science , that it has always been difficult to say what is purely science and what merely art . The relative proportions of use and structure , and that which appeals to sentiment , vary

with the work in hand ; sometimes the use Avill predominate , and a latent grace be suffused with it ; sometimes the purpose will be directly the gratification of sentiment . In any case , the requirements of construction , and the conditions imposed by the properties of materialsare such that

, they must needs either limit the design , or be taken as part of the foundation of the art and beauty of it . The artist-architect therefore Avill be precisely he Avho is acquainted with the science

of building , and Avith the materials , Avhether those of the mineral and vegetable kingdoms , or of the other kingdom falling under natural history . The designer of patterns for furniture , ceramic manufactures , or textile fabrics , will be one acquainted Avith that Avhich the material aud manufacture will

allow him to do . Each will produce the best art , because of the-combined possession of the knoAVledo-e and of the feeling- or sentiment . Classification , however necessary , it must be recollected is not defined by lines in nature . There , every objectand every field of man ' s science or art ,

, exists in a relation witli everything else , and is incomplete Avithout it , so that the architect might Avell approach his profession with awe . Feeble his strength , and infantine his mental grasp , in presence of the demands in that AA hich he presumes to designate as his vocation .

The errors that have been made in art design , as applied to manufactures , have mostly resulted from some omission of attention to the properties or conditions of the material or A ehicle used : and

less attention seems to be paid in the teaching of the Department of Art to such points than Avas at one time given . Many of the objects in the South Kensington Museum are rather to be condemned than taken as models ; and some of them would , according to Mr . Layard ' s principle , be

placed in the British Museum , rather than in his museum of applied art . We do not see , hoAvever , how the separation is to be effected in either of the museums , betAveen the objects assumed of one class and those of the other . The recognition of the two principles in the arrangement Avould be

desirable ; but to be efficient , objects in each collection should be represented in the classification of the other by casts or photographs , correctly placed in the series , and bearing a reference to the originals . Supplemented , as Ave have said , the classifications shadowed forth hy Mr . Layard

Avould be most instructive . Buildings quite as extensive as any that have been proposed might be necessary ; but probably no sum Avould be too great to pay for the educational and other results

accruing . The arguments Avhich there are in favour of a non-restriction of study on the part of any professor of art or science , to his particular profession , might be taken as showing the desirableness of keeping the natural history collections of the British Museum Avhere they are . But , it must be confessed that the increased and increasing demands of the different collections miVhfc result in

a building on such an extended plan , that the association in idea would be largely interfered Avith by a disconnection in fact . Any diminution of the importance attached to specimens of natural history by the decorative artist , or in the view of . art by the public , should be striven

against ; but Ave are open to argument that the separation might be on the whole desirable . Whether the removal should be South Kensington .,