The Glory Hole 17 3 



could fail to be thrilled to hold in his hand our specimen 

 of Drepanis pacifica? This was the bird from which the 

 feathers were taken to make the royal robe of Kamehameha 

 the Great. The bird is extinct and our specimen was col- 

 lected by Bloxam, who sailed on the Blond. It is, moreover, 

 the cotype of a species. Any naturalist will know what I 

 mean. 



Edward S. Morse wrote an article for the Atlantic 

 Monthly in July 1893, entitled "If PubUc Libraries Why 

 Not Public Museums." I think Morse was entirely wrong 

 in the type of museum which he outlined as being instruc- 

 tive to the public. Morse's all-consuming intellectual curi- 

 osity led him to believe that all of us were similarly en- 

 dowed, as of course we are not. Bits of desiccated slime in 

 a row of bottles carefully labeled captured Morse's inter- 

 est just as rows of rock samples, all looking more or less 

 alike, enabled him to point with pride to the fact that this 

 exhibit included a piece of every sort of rock found in 

 Essex County. This sort of material has no value for pur- 

 poses of public instruction; nothing has except that which 

 is inherently attractive. 



The Mineralogical Hall in the University Museum in 

 Cambridge contains a vast number of objects of the most 

 extreme beauty and rarity, yet not one person in a thou- 

 sand who comes to see the glass flowers in an adjoining 

 hall steps across the threshold to look at the minerals. This 

 was even more conspicuously the case in the museum in 

 Salem, where the minerals were relatively inaccessible and 

 really only displayed for the instruction of public-school 

 classes, and the number of visits made by such classes had 



