The British Museum, in the Bloomsbury area of London, England, is a public institution dedicated to human history, art and culture. Its permanent collection of some eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence, having been widely collected during the era of the British Empire. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. It was the first public national museum in the world.

The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. Its expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of expanding British colonisation and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881.

In 1973, the British Library Act 1972 detached the library department from the British Museum, but it continued to host the now separated British Library in the same Reading Room and building as the museum until 1997. The museum is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, and as with all national museums in the UK it charges no admission fee, except for loan exhibitions. Wikipedia, Bristish Museum

Hughes
1867.—"Your plan of eliciting facts from Scripture (altogether new) interests me exceedingly." "To make out the scheme of harmonical parallel proper for the elucidation of your system, it will, if possible, run all true with the harmony of colour, and this has never yet been done, except in a way which has been met with serious objections. When I commenced the examination of your theory, I spent five days at the British Museum, and collated about forty volumes." "I am very glad to hear you have a probability of harmonising numbers by the same laws as light and sound." "What you call rest, I call the appearance and disappearance of a harmonical cycle." "Your series of fifths is quite correct." [Harmonies of Tones and Colours, Extracts from Dr. Gauntlett's Letters1, page 48]