160 Naturalist at Large 



animal is something which can never be duplicated, 

 never repeated; it is there, once for all, as something 

 to be appealed to, something that cannot, by the rules 

 under which the systematist works, be superseded. It 

 may seem to be of little interest at the moment; it may 

 not be recalled for years; but it will be required, and 

 will come into its own when much work in other 

 branches has become obsolete through change of 

 fashion or improved technique, or has been shown to 

 be useless for any further advance. 



One year when I was feeling homiletical I decided to 

 head my Annual Report with a text and I chose this line: 

 "A satisfied curator, like a finished museum, is damned 

 and done for." That is exactly where the museum is like 

 the library. It has got to keep growing; otherwise its sig- 

 nificance ceases. One gets more books and the other gets 

 more critters. There is no great difference between the 

 two. 



Our science museums at Cambridge form such a patch- 

 work quilt that a great deal of confusion exists concern- 

 ing the organization. The Museum of Comparative Zool- 

 ogy, built from money appropriated by the Massachusetts 

 Legislature and that donated by friends of Professor Agas- 

 siz, is housed in a building which was commenced in 1859. 

 A gift of Mr. Francis Calley Gray settled it with an un- 

 changeable name and a cumbersome one, too — the Mu- 

 seum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College. Then 

 in 1876 Mr. George Peabody chose Cambridge, along with 

 Salem and New Haven, for the establishment of museums 

 of several sorts. The one in Cambridge became the Peabody 



