21.
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THE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
songs, some brief treatise which might help them to know whether it is a fish or a serpent which is offered to their grasp, and to perceive that they are receiving bread, where they thought it was a stone.
II. The Home Industrial Museum, secondly, should be a place where the nature and value of the unknown products of this country and of foreign countries might be ascertained and made public. Investigations into native products calculated to serve the entire nation have been prosecuted in all the practical museums of the country since their establishment. I mention one or two. At the Museum of Economic Geology, London, an elaborate and most valuable series of researches on the steam coals of the Navy, was made some years ago by Sir Henry De la Beche, and Dr. Lyon Playfair. An equally important series of analyses of the iron-ores of England has recently been completed under Dr. Percy of the same Museum; and Dr. Hoffmann and Mr. Witt, who are also among its officers, have investigated at great length, the question, How far, without prejudice to the public health, the sewage of great towns may be rendered agriculturally useful. Sir Robert Kane, Director of the Museum of Irish Industry, Dublin, has devoted an entire volume to the discussion of
AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE.
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the Industrial resources of Ireland. Along with Dr. Sullivan, he has also made a detailed report on the modes in which the too abundant peat of his native country can be rendered useful; and in the laboratory of that museum, the question of cultivating beet-root in Ireland as a source of sugar, has been very fully considered. Similar investigations are continually in progress.
As for foreign countries, every day ships bring to our great sea-ports, important raw materials which, through the ignorance of brokers, are wasted or neglected. I speak on this point chiefly on the authority of Professor Archer of Liverpool, who illustrated the fact at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and has since repeatedly brought it before meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. He has furnished me with many examples of the truth I refer to. He has moreover himself organised a museum at Liverpool, to assist his townsmen in overcoming the difficulties which ignorance sets in the way of their enterprise, and has made public the important suggestion which I commend to your special approval, that samples of every strange raw material which passes through the Inland Revenue Office, should be sent to one, or other, or all of the Industrial Museums of the country, to be