Lifenjuork 159 



I cannot emphasize too strongly the fact that the pur- 

 pose of a museum hke the one in Boston is as different 

 from that of the one in Cambridge as chalk is from cheese. 

 For financial reasons, the Boston Museum must limit its 

 field to pubHc instruction, to support such activities as the 

 Junior Explorers, to provide decent service for public- 

 school classes. The Museum in Cambridge supplements 

 university instruction in general zoology, comparative 

 anatomy, and paleontology. It trains curators for other 

 museums. Incidentally, without interfering with its more 

 important activities, it provides opportunity for instruction 

 to the public-school children of Cambridge and educational 

 exhibits on a limited scale for persons of more mature 

 years. It is, however, primarily a museum dedicated to 

 investigation and to the publication of the results thereof. 

 It deals primarily with what is called systematic zoology 

 — taxonomy, in other words; and Mr. Charles Regan Wil- 

 liams in England has set forth concisely and explicitly 

 what taxonomy is: — 



The value of Systematic Zoology is generally un- 

 derstood, though perhaps still occasionally liable to 

 deprecation. The first requisite in zoological work of 

 any kind — morphological, economic, or any other — 

 is to know what one is dealing with; before we can so 

 much as begin on any other problem, we must know 

 what our animals are — must have them described, 

 named, and classified; and Systematic Zoology, which 

 does this, is thus the bed-rock on which all other 

 zoological research ultimately rests. Such work stands 

 for all time; the first adequate description of a new 



