Abstract
WHILE the very valuable display of educational appliances is still on view at the Health Exhibition, I should like to draw attention to the school museums which are becoming now an important element in the teaching of science. In Mr. Lant Carpenter's papers they were only slightly alluded to, though he did full justice to the technical exhibits. In the recent Instructions to Her Majesty's Inspectors it is laid down that an infant school which deserves to be considered “excellent” and to receive a corresponding merit grant should have a cabinet of objects which it is suggested should be partly collected by the children themselves. This of course is making teachers anxious to form such collections, and the London School Board supplies a cabinet wherever there is a promising nucleus for such a museum; it also supplies to any teacher that desires it a small box of chemical apparatus for making simple experiments on these objects, with instructions for the use of the different pieces of apparatus. One of these sets of apparatus forms part of the exhibit of the London Board. Of course the collection of the infants' department will be of a miscellaneous character, but in the museums that are now being formed in many of the boys' and girls' departments something better may be aimed at. The School Cabinet in Room No. 4 is filled principally from the schools in the neighbourhood of South Kensington. There are stuffed birds and a small crocodile, together with neatly-mounted skulls of animals, and specimens of corals, shells, and sponges, all from the collections at Park Walk, Chelsea. From other schools there are the skeleton of a rabbit dissected by a boy of eleven years of age, insects, reptiles, and other objects. There is also a collection from the Silver Street School at Kensington, contributed by scholars, teachers, and managers, comprising colonial products of various descriptions, specimens of different kinds of wood, many of them cut from the trees blown down by the great storm that was so destructive in Kensington Gardens in the autumn of 1881. There are also specimens of horseshoes with their appropriate nails, and illustrations of the successive processes in the manufacture of iron, cotton, and jute. These are all properly named and labelled by the schoolmaster. The lowest shelf of the cabinet contains illustrations of the geology of Peckham, ranging from the sands and gravels of the ancient Thames, the London Clay, the Woolwich and Reading beds, and the Thanet Sands, down to the Chalk. These form part of a fine collection at the Nunhead Passage Board School, Peckham. From the same school also there is a separate cabinet of minerals, which is displayed in the corridor. Some of the training colleges have formed good museums, as is evidenced by the collection from the Wesleyan College in Westminster.
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GLADSTONE, J. School Museums. Nature 30, 384 (1884). https://doi.org/10.1038/030384a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/030384a0
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