ART AND SCIENCE IN THE MUSEUM 89 



caused by these old exhibits was physical, owing to the poor 

 arrangement of the specimens which made it necessary for the 

 spectator to get into many unnatural positions in order to see 

 the objects and read the labels. I believe, however, that the 

 major part of the fatigue and discomfort came from a mental 

 rather than a physical strain. 



A friend of mine who is a hunter and naturalist, once asked me 

 to go with him through one of the older museums in the East. 

 We met by appointment and spent the entire day looking over 

 the various collections. When night came my friend asked to be 

 excused from an engagement for that evening saying that he 

 believed he would go to bed as he was completely exhausted. 

 Now this ^me friend on a previous occasion tramped miles with 

 me in the woods, climbed trees for birds' eggs, crawled hundreds 

 of yards flat on his stomach after young ducks, and yet when 

 night came was not seriously fatigued. 



In these days when all wild life is rapidly disappearing, when 

 the specimens that we are placing in our exhibits may be the last 

 of their kind to be secured, there is brought home to all of us the 

 importance of permanently preserving them, of being sure that 

 we have taken every precaution for their safety. In these days of 

 experiment and investigation, I believe there is no excuse for a 

 museum man who does not keep up with the times, and perma- 

 nently and artistically preserve for future generations some of the 

 phenomena of nature that will soon be gone forever. 



In early days all kinds of museum material could be collected 

 with little difficulty. Grease-burned skins, museum metal-disease, 

 and other things that now try the soul of a curator were, if not 

 unheard of, at least not generally known. Today the matter of 

 permanently preserving museum material is one of the most 

 serious things that confronts us. Any of the people who lived 

 in the Middle West fifty years ago, can remember the great flocks 

 of passenger pigeons. We have records to show that they were 

 sold in the market for one cent each, and yet today it is impossible 

 to find a perfect skin. How many pigeon skins could a man get 

 if- he were to make a standing ofifer of $50 per skin? What would 

 one have to pay for the skin of a California condor, an ivory- 

 billed woodpecker, a heath hen, or a Carolina parakeet, and what 

 would be the condition of these skins if he did succeed in finding 

 them? Recently we succeeded in getting three passenger 

 pigeons that had been mounted thirty to thirty-five years ago. 

 These birds we remounted and placed in an exhibit in our 



