The Parkes Museum

THE PLACE TO SPEND A HAPPY DAY

By way of jest, my morning daily paper constantly includes in its menu
of "To-day" the Parkes Museum, Margaret Street, adding, seductively,
"free"; and no doubt many a festive Jonas Chuzzlewit has preened himself
for a sight-seeing, and all unaware of the multitudes of Margaret
Streets--surely only Charlottes of that ilk are more abundant--has
started forth, he and his feminine, to find this Parkes Museum. One may
even conceive a rare Bank Holiday thoughtfully put aside for the quest,
and spent all vainly in the asking of policemen, and in traversing this
vast and tiresome metropolis, from Margaret Street to Margaret Street,
the freshness of the morning passing into the dry heat of the day,
fatigue spreading from the feet upwards, discussion, difference, denial,
"words," and a day of recreation dying at last into a sunset of lurid
sulks. Such possibility was too painful to think of, and a philanthropic
inquirer has at last by persistent investigation won the secret of the
Missing Museum and opened the way to it for all future investigators.

The Margaret Street in question is an apparently derelict thoroughfare,
opening into Great Portland Street. Immemorial dust is upon its
pavements, and a profound silence broods over its vacant roadway. The
blinds of its houses are mostly down, and, where the blackness of some
window suggests a dark interior, no face appears to reassure us in our
doubt of humanity within. It may be that somewhen in the past the entire
population of this street set out on a boating party up the river, and
was overset by steam launches, and so never returned, or perchance it
has all been locked up for a long term of imprisonment--though the
houses seem almost too respectable for that; or the glamour of the
Sleeping Beauty is upon it all. Certainly we saw the figure of a porter
in an attitude of repose in the little glass lodge in the museum
doorway. He _may_ have been asleep. But we feared to touch him--and
indeed slipped very stealthily by him--lest he should suddenly crumble
into dust.

And so to the Museum and its wonders. This Parkes Museum is a kind of
armoury of hygiene, a place full of apparatus for being healthy--in
brief, a museum of sanitary science. To that large and growing class of
people who take no thought of anything but what they eat and what they
drink, and wherewithal they should be clothed, it should prove intensely
interesting. Apart from the difficulty of approach we cannot understand
how it is so neglected by an intelligent public. You can see germicides
and a model convict prison, Pentonville cells in miniature, statistical
diagrams and drain pipes--if only there was a little more about
heredity,