212 Memorial of George Brown Goode. 



3. There are many objects now in the custody of art museums, which 

 would be more appropriately placed if in the museums of anthropology 

 or history. 



Comment. — There are special collections on the boundary line between art and 

 ethnology, the manner of best installation for which has scarcely yet been deter- 

 mined. The Louvre admits within its walls a museum of ship models. South 

 Kensington includes musical instruments, and many other objects equally appro- 

 priate in an ethnological collection. Other art museums take up art and armor, 

 selected costumes, shoes, and articles of household use. Such objects, like por- 

 celains, laces, medals, and metal work, appeal to the art museum administrator 

 through their decorations and graceful forms. For their uses he cares presumably 

 nothing. As a consequence of this feeling, only articles of artistic excellence have 

 been saved, and much has gone to destruction which would be of the utmost import- 

 ance to those who are now studying the history of human thought in the past. 



On the other hand, there is much in art museums which might to much better 

 purpose be delivered to the ethnologist for use in his exhibition cases. There is 

 also much which the art museum, tied as it often is to traditionary methods of 

 installation, might learn from the scientific museums. 



Many of the arrangements in the European art collections are calculated to send 

 cold shivers down the back of a sensitive visitor. The defects of these arrange- 

 ments have been well described by a German critic, W. Biirger. "Our museums," 

 he writes, "are the veritable graveyards of art in which have been heaped up, with 

 a tumulous-like promiscuousness, the remains which have been carried thither. A 

 Venus is placed side by side with a Madonna, a satj'r next to a saint. Luther is in 

 close proximity to a pope, a painting of a lady's chamber next to that of a church. 

 Pieces executed for churches, palaces, city halls, for a particular edifice to teach 

 some moral or historic truth, designed for some especial light, for some well-studied 

 surrounding, all are hung pellmell upon the walls of some noncommittal gallery — 

 a kind of posthumous asylum, where a people, no longer capable of producing works 

 of art, come to admire this magnificent gallery of debris. ' ' 



D. — NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS. 



1. The museum of natural history is the depository for objects which 

 illustrate the forces and phenomena of nature — the named units included 

 within the three kingdoms, animal, vegetable, and mineral — and whatever 

 illustrates their origin in time (or phylogeny), their individual origin, 

 development, growth, function, structure, and geographical distribution — 

 past and present; also their relation to each other, and their influence 

 upon the structure of the earth and phenomena observed upon it. 



2. Mu.seums of natural history and anthropology meet on common 

 ground in man. In practice, the former usually treats of man in his 

 relations toother animals, the latter of man in his relations to other men. 



Comment. — In most national capitals there are general museums in which col- 

 lections representing the three kingdoms of nature are included in one group. 

 Among the oldest and most prominent types of this class are the British Museum 

 of Natural History in vSouth Kensington, and the Mussed' Histoire Naturelle in Paris, 

 and there are numerous others in the great cities of both hemispheres. 



Among specialized natural history collections, a good type is the Museum of Com- 

 parative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, founded by Agassiz to illustrate the 

 history of creation, as far as the present state of knowledge reveals that history, 

 which was, in 1887, pronounced by Alfred Russell Wallace to be far in advance of 



