seum to collect and preserve scientific data and to utilize 

 these data for the education of the people, who support the 

 museum. 



In the past three years the Charleston Museum has carried 

 on its educational work through the medium of the Natural 

 History Society, public lectures, talks to schools, loan and 

 travelling exhibits, and the pages of the Bulletin and the 

 daily press. The public has responded with increasingly 

 generous support and yet few changes have been made in 

 the obsolete exhibits of the museum halls. This is, of 

 course, due in part to the prospect of removal to a new 

 building, but the public may well ask why new exhibits are 

 not more rapidly forthcoming and the Director believes that 

 an attempt to answer this question will bring the public into 

 closer sympathy with the present work and future prospects 

 of the Museum. 



Readers of the Bulletin are aware that the Museum is 

 the result of more than one hundred and thirty years' growth 

 and that it has been moved a number of times and passed 

 through many periods of adversity as well as of enthusiastic 

 and generous support. All of these vicissitudes have pro- 

 duced much confusion of the records since the history of 

 each specimen has merely been written on a paper label laid 

 beside it and seldom attached to it. Unfortunately, the data 

 were frequently incomplete in the beginning; in hundreds of 

 cases all signs of labels have entirely disappeared; in many 

 others the ink has faded or the paper decayed; and even 

 when labels and specimens both exist they are almost al- 

 ways so mixed together that each tray or shelf or box must 

 be studied and arranged by a specialist before any specimens 

 can be moved. 



Since all activities of a museum are dependent upon accurate 

 records and since such records had never been kept in this mu- 

 seum and especially since any attempt to move the Museum 

 before the records were straight would result in further 



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