NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS 41 



like much reading of books, a poor substitute for the activities of life. 

 Again, universities often undertake work that might be much better 

 left to museums. Thus if there is a museum conveniently near it seems 

 to be a waste for a university to plan large taxonomic collections or 

 even to give courses of taxonomic nature. For if a student wishes to 

 learn species and their distinctions, he can gain this knowledge far 

 better in the reference museum than in the laboratory ; and to change a 

 laboratory into a museum is to injure its proper use. Taxonomic col- 

 lections and courses may well be omitted from universities, and stu- 

 dents wishing these subjects should be directed to museums. A her- 

 barium or a collection of shells is as much out of place in a laboratory 

 as a bull in a china shop, for the university laboratory is for experi- 

 mental work. 



This idea may be pushed still further. When a museum has already 

 large reference collections, not only there is no need of universities 

 trying to duplicate these, but also the university should leave to mu- 

 seums the teaching of subjects for which such collections are the basis. 

 This is the kind of teaching that would bring most results to the 

 museums. Thus nature-study courses of all kinds could be best pre- 

 sented by museums, with their large local collections and their curators 

 trained in knowledge of species and habitudes. Systematic courses in 

 entomology might also be most profitably given in a museum ; and these 

 are growing in importance, now that insects are receiving so much at- 

 tention by agriculturalists, and by physicians in their relation to dis- 

 ease. Practically all of our best entomologists, mammalogists, ornithol- 

 ogists and systematic botanists, whose work is of the greatest practical 

 importance, have grown up in museums. But at the present time their 

 training consists in becoming assistants in museums, helping in the 

 arrangements of collections with no training whatsoever in the broader 

 sides of the subject, and taking many years to learn what they might 

 otherwise gain in a much shorter time, provided their work was directed 

 from the start. A man told to label a certain collection will in time 

 learn how to do so, but if he is to do more than merely determine 

 species he must follow a plan of work. Such a course might be worked 

 out in some such way as the following. The curator of entomology 

 might each year direct a course in general systematic entomology or on 

 injurious insects. The teaching need not be done by lectures, but with 

 specified work on the object to be carried out by the student, assigned 

 reading and practical examinations. Not much of the curator's time 

 need be consumed, he would simply have to outline the work and to 

 occasionally oversee it. The student would then begin with the ad- 

 vantage of the help of the judgment of a trained specialist. It stands 

 to reason that such a course under a competent entomologist could be 

 done better in most museums than in most universities. Such an initial 



