430 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1892. 



structed to represent an arctic realm, carried down in the foreground 

 and to one side to the seashore, and upon another rocks, glacial ice, 

 sheet ice, and what not, as representing the higher land. Then the 

 foreground should be merged with the background by a skillful artist, 

 so as to cany with it great depth, and offer the opportunity to show 

 peculiarities of a sky perhaps, and the effect of distance, as well as to 

 add other accessories, as a distant shore covered with seals, or, higher 

 np, a herd of caribou. Such a case could be made to contain an entire 

 marine mammalian fauna, and be made far more instructive and impos- 

 ing than single specimens an comfortably huddled or scattered through 

 the various cases, absolutely ignoring any zoological arrangement. 



We have the power and the understanding now to carry out such 

 bold designs, and it is high time that we were about it. The whole 

 tendency is in just such directions, and all it requires is skillful hand- 

 ling. What an object lesson or lessons such groups would be, and this 

 broad and deep country of oars, including every kind of a fauna and 

 flora from. Alaska to Florida, thriving in every variety of climate, 

 includes the very scries of zones, realms, and areas that should by just 

 such means be illustrated, it would represent ideas and groups of 

 ideas, and ideas are what we want. It would powerfully illustrate 

 literature as the biologist now makes it for us, and in an orderly man- 

 ner show our people what we mean by faunal areas, Arctic realms, 

 geographical ranges, variations of animals under varying conditions of 

 altitude, desert areas, and shore lines. Museums, among other things, 

 are made to educate the people of a nation; but a favored few of the 

 people can study such things in nature. So it is the business of the 

 museum to bring whole living sections of nature within its walls, where 

 it can be studied and where books and labels are displayed in abun- 

 dance to help show how it ought to be studied. 



When we can make such animals and groups of animals as those 

 shown in Plates lxxxix. or lxxix, or lxxxi, there can be no question in 

 the world but what the more extensive groups can be combined with 

 more telling effect. But to be successful in the highest sense of the 

 word there must be no cheap designers, cheap modelers, cheap artists, 

 or cheap anything employed; all must be of the very best that the 

 United States affords — and we have it in both talent and material. 

 Especially for the painted backgrounds should an artist of the very 

 highest ability be employed, wit 1 a staff of others to assist in the intro- 

 duction of distant animals, forests, or marine effects. If refinement, 

 knowledge, science, and art are wholesomely combined in such efforts 

 there is not one bit of danger of either producing a cheap museum 

 effect, much less anything that savors of the scenery of the theatrical 

 stage. In one sense it would be far more economical, in the same pro- 

 portion that it is far more so to make one large case of animals than it 

 is to build up six or eight small ones. 



Then the space throughout the Museum halls, apart from the regional 



