MUSEUM-HISTORY AND MUSEUMS OF HISTORY. 



By Georgk Brown Goode, 



Assistant Secretary, Smithsonian Institution, in charge of the U. S. National 



Museum. 



The true significance of the word museum may perhaps best be 

 brought to our apprehension by an allusion to the ages which preceded 

 its origin — when our ancestors, hundreds of generations removed, were 

 in the midst of those great migrations which peopled Europe with races 

 originally seated farther to the east. 



It has been well said that the stor}^ of early Greece is the first chapter 

 in the history of the political and intellectual life of Europe. 



To the history of Greece let us go for the origin of the museum idea, 

 which in its present form seems to have found its only congenial home 

 among the European offshoots of the Indo- Germanic division of the 

 world's inhabitants. 



Museums, in the language of ancient Greece, were the homes of the 

 muses. The first were in the groves of Parnassus and Helicon, and later 

 the3^were temples in various parts of Hellas. Soon, however, the mean- 

 ing of the word changed, and it was used to describe a place of study, or 

 a school. Athenseus described Athens in the second century as ' ' the 

 museum of Greece," and the name of museum was definitely applied to 

 that portion of the palace of Alexandria which was set apart for the study 

 of the sciences, and which contained the famous Alexandrian library. 

 The museum of Alexandria was a great university, the abiding place of 

 men of science and letters, who were divided into many companies or 

 colleges, and for whose support a handsome revenue was allotted. 



The Alexandrian museum was destroyed in the days of Caesar and 

 Aurelian, and the term museum, as applied to a great public institution, 

 dropped out of use from the fourth to the seventeenth century. The 

 disappearance of a word is an indication that the idea for which it stood 

 has also fallen into disfavor; and such, indeed, was the fact. The his- 

 tory of museum and library run in parallel lines. It is not until the 

 development of the arts and sciences has taken place, until an extensive 



'A paper read before the American Historical Association, in Washington City, 

 December 26-28, 1888. 



NAT MUS 97, PT 2 5 65 



