FEB. 19, 1921 sosman: distribution op scientific information 77 



There is a curious psychical limitation on the effectiveness of the 

 museum, arising from the feeling on the part of many that a 

 museum is a place where dusty and cob -webbed curios have lain 

 on shelves for years; a place which one visits once in his lifetime, 

 while "traveling." The population of the District of Columbia 

 is a little over 0.4 million. During the twelve months ending with 

 June 1920 practically this number of people visited the main building 

 of the National Museum, and it is probable that the most of these 

 were tourists or travelers. Yet in the same period the National 

 Zoological Park, containing much that is interesting but little that 

 is usefully instructive, entertained over 2.2 million visitors. 



The arithmetical limitation on the effectiveness of a museum 

 may be seen from the fact that if every city in the United States 

 having 10,000 or more inhabitants possessed a museum, and if a 

 given object in each were examined for two minutes by each one of 

 a constant stream of visitors passing all through a 7-hour day every 

 day in the year, then every person in the United States would have 

 such an opportunity for instruction once every three years. 



The psychical disinclination to make real use of a museum is absent 

 in the case of the "exhibition," "exposition" or "fair," which is avail- 

 able only for a short time and must be taken advantage of at once 

 or not at all. The commercial world has made use of this medium 

 of distributing information to a much greater extent than the scientific 

 world, but its possibilities are well illustrated on the small scale by 

 the success of such expositions as that held a few years ago by the 

 Washington Academy of Sciences, and by the exhibition of the wire- 

 less telephone held in Washington last year by the National Research 

 Council and the American Telephone and Telegraph Company; 

 and on the large scale by the National Exposition of Chemical Indus- 

 tries in New York, which instructed over 0.1 million people during 

 its few days of activity last September. 



To summarize : The museum and exhibition are more efficiently 

 utilized by the public than by the investigator. It is probable that 

 comparatively little new knowledge is distributed to its producers 

 by this channel. The method is physically unable, however, to reach 

 the whole public effectively; but it is, of all the means of distribu- 

 tion, the one most capable of neutralizing, by systematic and cor- 

 related exhibits, the disadvantage of heterogeneity. 



Distribution by the printed page. — The changed circumstances of 

 the world that followed from the invention of printing, and especially 



