INTRODUCTION 7 



Professor Benjamin Waterhouse showed the Museum to the 

 Venezuelan patriot Miranda in 1784. Miranda, in his diary, re- 

 porting the visit, remarks that the collections were ill arranged and 

 somewhat neglected in appearance. 



The collections were finally removed from Harvard Hall, and 

 migrated to various storage places for many years. For a while they 

 were kept in Holden Chapel. Later the objects were moved to 

 Boylston Hall, and we read in Dr. O. W. Holmes' memoir of Pro- 

 fessor Jeffries Wyman (Atlantic Monthly, November, 1874) the 

 following: 



We enter the modest edifice known as Boylston Hall, and going up a 

 flight of stairs find a door at the right, through which we pass into a hall ex- 

 tending the whole depth of the building. The tables in the centre of the 

 floor, the cases surrounding the apartment, and the similar cases in the gal- 

 lery over these, are chiefly devoted to comparative anatomy. Above the 

 first gallery is a second, devoted to the archaeological and ethnological ob- 

 jects which make up the Peabody Museum. 



The fine effect of the hall and its arrangements will at once strike the ob- 

 server. In the centre of the floor stands the huge skeleton of a mastodon 

 found in Warren County, New Jersey, in 1 844. Full-sized casts of the " fight- 

 ing gladiator," as it was formerly called, and the Venus of Milo stand at the 

 two extremities of the hall, and one of the Venus de Medici opposite the 

 door. Stretched out at length in glass cases are the anatomical wax figures, 

 male and female, which used of old to be so wondered over by the awe- 

 struck visitors who had gained admission into little Holden Chapel. The 

 skeletons of a large alligator, and of an overgrown ant-eater; a rattlesnake of 

 fearful size and aspect, and a youthful saw-fish, both in alcohol; a slab with 

 fossil foot-prints from the Connecticut River valley, and cases of separate 

 bones from the four animal kingdoms, are the other principal objects 

 grouped about the mastodon. 



In the cases around the room are great numbers of fine skeletons, of man 

 and of various animals, — among them of the jaguar, the ostrich, the boa- 

 constrictor, and of immense sea-turdes. Most interesting of all are the skull 

 and other bones of a mightly gorilla . His head and pelvis are far from human 

 in their aspect, but his arm-bone is so like that of his cousin Darwinian, 

 that it looks as if it might have belonged to Goliath of Oath, or Og, king of 

 Bashan. The skeleton of a young chimpanzee, by the side of that of a child, 

 has a strongly marked effect of similar significance. There are also whole 

 series of special preparations to show the parts of the skeleton concerned in 

 locomotion in different classes of animals. 



The cases in the gallery contain a vast number of wet and dry prepara- 

 tions, of which a very few may be indicated. One of Professor Wyman's last 

 labors was to refill the jars of the wet preparations with alcohol, and they are 



