Page:Notes on the Present and Future of the Archaeological Collections of the University of Oxford.djvu/9

 Types of art are so intermingled and so run into each other, that ancient objects brought from one country must be studied side by side with those brought from another, in order that the influences which cause various forms to assimilate or disagree may be traced out and appreciated. It is, for example, as misleading and unreasonable to divorce Greek from Roman antiquities, or Cyprian and Assyrian from Egyptian, as it would be to separate the Birds from the Reptiles in a Museum of Natural History, or to cut off the Saurians of the Lias from the Crocodiles and Alligators of the present day.

The Archaeological Collections belonging to the University are five in number, or to speak more correctly, the ancient objects belonging to it are divided into five Collections, to the great injury of each, and these are stowed away, I can scarcely say arranged, in at least four different buildings. Were all these scattered objects combined into one Collection Oxford would possess the nucleus of a fine Museum, whose gaps her loving sons might be trusted to fill up; but just where consolidation or combination are needed, there are found division and dispersion. Of these Collections the largest, most varied, and best is that upon the ground floor of the Ashmolean Museum, a quaint, characteristic, and not unpleasing building, erected at the charge of the University to contain the Collections of Elias Ashmole, given to the University on that condition, a circumstance, by the way, which ought to go far towards nipping in the bud any project for confiscating the building to other uses, and amalgamating its Archaeological treasures with the Gorgonias, Stuffed Monkeys, and Fish Skeletons in the New Museum. In the vaulted room under the Ashmolean, besides the remainder of its Collection proper, is a moiety of the once celebrated and highly-prized