Leiden Museum of Natural History appears in the boys’ Leiden itinerary as a collection of fossil animals, skeletons, birds, minerals, precious stones, and other specimens. Their visit turns the museum into more than a catalogue of curiosities: their wonder, and the limits of what they understand, show how travel can awaken an appetite for knowledge while exposing how much remains to be learned.

The Collection and the Visit

After examining the Egyptian antiquities at the Egyptian Museum of Leiden, the boys went to another museum: Leiden Museum of Natural History. They walked through its displays of fossil animals, skeletons, birds, minerals, and precious stones. The narration gives no detailed account of the specimens’ arrangement or scientific interpretation; its emphasis is on the breadth of the collection and the visitors’ response to it.

The boys could admire what they saw, but they recognized that they were not learned men. They made their way through the collection with only the natural-history knowledge they already possessed, and wished they had acquired more. The visit thus joins pleasure in looking with an awareness of the work required to understand what is on display.

Jacob Poot and the Mouse Skeleton

The most particular moment comes when Jacob Poot is puzzled by the skeleton of a mouse. He is unused to seeing the small creatures he associates with fear of cats reduced to bones, and their necks seem strange to him. The episode is gently comic, but it also gives the museum scene its clearest measure of discovery: even a familiar animal becomes unfamiliar when encountered in a form the visitor has not learned to read.

Jacob’s confusion is not presented as a failure of the collection. Rather, it distinguishes seeing from understanding. The specimens invite observation, while the boys’ limited knowledge leaves some of what they see unresolved; their wish to know more follows directly from that gap.

Place in the Leiden Itinerary

The visit belongs to a sequence of sightseeing that moves among different kinds of knowledge and memory. After the natural-history collection, the boys visit Saint Peter's Church, where they see memorials to Professor Luzac and Boerhaave, and then enter a tea garden and climb the mound at its center. The mound is identified as the site of a ruined round tower, associated in competing accounts with Hengist or an ancient count of Holland.

From the tower wall, the boys obtain only a poor view of Leiden. Yet the narration uses the site to recall the city under siege: more than two centuries earlier, people had called up to the watcher at the tower for news of help and of the rising waters. The museum itself is not assigned a direct role in that history, but its place in the itinerary sets natural specimens alongside a city whose other visited sites carry historical memory.

Narrative Role

The scene reflects the book’s stated effort to combine the interest of a domestic tale with the instructive features of travel writing. Leiden’s museums are not described only as attractions; the boys’ reactions make their visit a lesson in the difference between curiosity and expertise. The natural-history collection’s range, followed by Jacob’s close attention to one small skeleton, gives that lesson both breadth and a concrete point of focus.