A third feature that cannot be overlooked is shown in the numerous cases of stuffed birds, in which the specimens are exhibited, not merely by themselves on conventional perches, but amid natural surroundings, usually associated with their nests and eggs or young. These exhibits have high artistic value in addition to their striking scientific worth. They teach ornithology as it should be taught, giving such clews to the recognition of birds in the fields as are not at all to be found in ordinary collections of stuffed specimens. This feature of the museum has, to be sure, been imitated in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, but the South Kensington Museum was the first in the field and is still the leader.
A few words should be added as to the use made by the public of the treasures offered for their free inspection by the British Museum. I shall attempt nothing further than a few data regarding actual visits to the museum. In the year 1899 the total number of such visits aggregated 663,724; in 1900 the figures rise to 689,249--well towards three-quarters of a million. The number of visits is smallest in the winter months, but mounts rapidly in April and May; it recedes slightly for June and July, and then comes forward to full tide in August, during which month more than ninety-five thousand people visited the museum in 1901, the largest attendance in a single day being more than nine thousand. August, of course, is the month of tourists--particularly of tourists from America--but it is interesting and suggestive to note that it is not the tourist alone who visits the British Museum, for the flood-tide days of attendance are always the Bank holidays, including Christmas boxing-day and Easter Monday, when the working-people turn out _en masse_. On these days the number of visits sometimes mounts above ten thousand.
All this, it will be understood, refers exclusively to the main building of the museum on Great Russell Street. But, meantime, out in Kensington, at the natural history museum, more than half a million visits each year are also made. In the aggregate, then, about a million and a quarter of visits are paid to the British Museum yearly, and though the bulk of the visitors may be mere sight-seers, yet even these must carry away many ideas of value, and it hardly requires argument to show that, as a whole, the educational influence of the British Museum must be enormous. Of its more direct stimulus to scientific work through the trained experts connected with the institution I shall perhaps speak in another connection.