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The Ashmolean Museum
The Ashmolean, which grew from the Tradescants' bequest, was for many years essentially a Cabinet of Curiosities on the grand scale. Its first catalogue, issued in 1656, makes this conclusion inescapable. Yet, in the form it took after its new building was completed in 1683, it was also the first modern museum, specifically designed to display its collections, organised so that the University could use it for teaching purposes, and regularly open to the public. It was arranged on a tripartite system, with rooms devoted to natural history specimens, antiquities and the inevitable curiosities, and also had a library, a lecture room and a chemical laboratory. The curators of the different departments were academics, and for nearly two hundred years, the Ashmolean was the main centre of scientific studies in the University
(Museums of Influence p21 - 22)
The British Museum
The British Museum was created by an Act of Parliament in 1753. Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, was bought for conversion and the Museum opened there in 1759. The great collections of Sir Hans Sloan, together with the manuscripts of Sir Robert Cotton and Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford, formed much of the original basis of the collections. ... The money to buy them came, not from the Treasury, but from the proceeds of a lottery. Once the Museum has been founded, Parliament, by providing annual grants on an extremely mean scale, made it difficult to offer a reasonable service to the public. Entry was severely restricted. For many years after the Museum was set up, there was a limit of sixty visitors a day. ... Daily opening was not brought in until 1879 ... Without private benefactors, the Museum's collections would hardly have increased at all, although, under pressure, Parliament did make grants from time to time specifically for a few important purchases, the chief of which were the Greek and Roman vases belonging to Sir William Hamilton ... and the Elgin Marbles in 1814-15. ... In the elegant surroundings of Montagu House, the British Museum was hardly a place of popular entertainment. A large part of what was on display consisted of manuscripts, books, coins, and medals, although the atmosphere would have been enlivened here and there by such items as Egyptian mummies ... and one of the horns which grew out of the head of a certain Mary Davies...
(Museums of Influence p23-24)