feeling listless

Museums Melissa's right, and this is always one of my bugbears -- poor labeling and layouts in museums. The very best museums have a narrative, tell the story of their subject. Even if its as simple in a gallery as placing the works in chronological order so that the visitor can see the sweep of art history despite the inevitable gaps. Science museums tend to be hopeless with this stuff, contenting themselves to displaying the objects under rough subject headings rather than offering the story of science. Why for example should chinese astronomy only be covered in the space section and not in the chinese civilisation area either instead or at the same time?

Why shouldn't a general museum present a history of the world? Often they do to a rough extent -- dinosaurs to egyptians to space but the various sciences never merge with one another and rather than displaying the history the world, you're seeing discrete histories running in parallel with one another. Which is fine, but wouldn't it be more interesting to display the whole collection by centuries or millenia? A room marked 1000 BC that features objects across the civilisations so that the visitor can really see how different countries effected each other development, making parallel development even clearer and that would include wildlife because even in war the human species often develops depending upon the food available. Its only in recent years I've understood that human history is a mass development and not a selection of discrete chronologies -- because in all the years of museum going I wasn't able to see the effect that Rome had on Egypt and vice-versa.