70 JOURNAL OF THE WASHINGTON ACADEMY OF SCIENCES VOL. 11, NO. 4 



Philanthropic lecturing is done almost entirely through the medium 

 of scientific or technical societies, which have now become very 

 numerous. Washington alone possesses 35 or more.^ The distribu- 

 tion of information by lecturers is also a secondary activity of many 

 social organizations. Finally there should be mentioned its use, 

 admittedly rather ineffective, in college and university instruction. 

 Altogether, assuming that there are annually in the District of Colum- 

 bia 300 meetings of scientific societies, 500 lectures before social 

 organizations, and 3000 lectures in our 8 universities and colleges, 

 with an attendance of 50 persons at each, a public informational 

 lecture reaches a given individual in the District on an average once 

 in every 2.4 years. And Washington is undoubtedly ahead of most 

 American cities in this respect. 



To summarize: The public lecture is largely used for the dis- 

 tribution of information among producers of information, in which 

 function its effectiveness, though not small, is limited more by the 

 heterogeneous character of the output than by any other factor.^ It 

 is very ineffective with respect to the public, not so much from physical 

 inaccessibility as from the limitations set upon it by the laws of 

 psychology. 



Museums and exhibitions. — Next in logical order after methods of 

 personal communication and public announcement should be placed 

 methods depending on the exhibition for public study of objects, 

 specimens, models, etc. Although the temporary "exhibition" or 

 "exposition" and the permanent museum both have a function as 

 distributors of information, they can be traced to rather different 

 origins; the exhibition, to the market or "fair," designed to bring 

 together buyers and sellers of commodities; the museum, to the 

 ecclesiastical or imperial collection of objects of art, trophies, and 

 "curiosities," which collections later became the property of the 

 public and were devoted to purposes of public instruction. f^ p^^ri 



The evolution of the modern scientific museum has been particu- 

 larly rapid. It has been hardly fifty years since the museum began 

 to be looked upon as sometliing more than a repository for the speci- 

 mens collected by explorers and a place for the study and comparison 

 of natural objects by specialists, and as offering tremendous possi- 

 bilities for the diffusion of knowledge. As compared with its pre- 

 decessors, the museum of today stresses the verb "diffuse" much 

 more than "collect." 



^ Directory of the Washington Academy of Sciences and its affiliated societies, 1921 edition. 



