72 Memorial of George Brozvn Goode. 



the people, and are more intimately intertwined with the policy of national 

 popular education. 



Sir Henry Cole, the working founder of the Department of Science and 

 Art, speaking of the purpose of the museums under his care, said to the 

 people of Birmingham in 1874: 



If you wish your schools of science and art to be effective, your heaUh, the air, 

 and your food to be wholesome, your life to be long, your manufactures to improve, 

 your trade to increase, and your people to be civilized, you must have museums of 

 science and art to illustrate the principles of life, health, nature, science, art, and 

 beauty. 



Again, in words as applicable to Americans of to-day as to Britons in 

 1874, said he: 



A thorough education and a knowledge of science and art are vital to the nation, 

 and to the place it holds at present in the civilized world. Science and art are the 

 lifeblood of successful production. All civilized nations are running a race with us, 

 and our national decline will date from the period when we go to sleep over the 

 work of education, science, and art. What has been done is at the mere threshold 

 of the work yet to be done. 



The people's museum should be much more than a house full of speci- 

 mens in glass cases. It should be a house full of ideas, arranged with 

 the strictest attention to system. I once tried to express this thought 

 by saying : ' 'An efficient educational musetim may be described as a col- 

 lection of instructive labels, each illustrated by a well-selected specimen." 



The museum, let me add, should be more than a collection of speci- 

 mens, well arranged and well labeled. Like the library, it should be 

 under the constant supervision of one or more men, well informed, schol- 

 arly, and withal practical, and fitted by tastes and training to aid in the 

 educational work. I should not organize the museums primarily for the 

 use of people in their larval or school-going stage of existence. The 

 public school-teacher, with the illustrated text-books, diagrams, and other 

 appliances, has in these days a professional outfit which is usually quite 

 .sufficient to enable him to teach his pupils. 



School days last at the most only from four to fifteen 5'ears, and they 

 end, with the majority of mankind, before their minds have reached the 

 stage of growth most favorable for the reception and assimilation of the 

 best and most useful thought. Why should we be crannned in the time 

 of infancy and kept in a state of mental starvation during the period 

 which follows, from maturity to old age — a state which is disheartening 

 and unnatural all the more because of the intellectual tastes which have 

 been stimulated and partially formed by school life? 



The nuLseum idea is much broader than it was fifty or even twenty- 

 five years ago. The musettm of to-day is no longer a chance assemblage 

 of curiosities, but rather a series of objects selected with reference to 

 their value to investigators, or their possibilities for public enlightenment. 

 The museum of the future may be made one of the chief agencies of the 

 higher civilization. 



