232 Memorial of George Brown Goode. 



plete he will have the material under control which would enable him to 

 write a very complete book of reference upon the subject. 



4. No task is more exacting than this form of precis writing. Not 

 only is it impossible to conceal lack of perfect knowledge, but the infor- 

 mation must be conveyed in a terse, concise, and definite phraseology, 

 such as is not demanded by any other class of writing, unless it may be 

 the preparation of definitions for a dictionary. He who writes definitions 

 for a dictionary, however, has usually the advantage of having before 

 him numerous other definitions of the same term which he needs only to 

 collate and rearrange. 



5. A good descriptive label should do something more than impart 

 information. It must be so phrased as to excite the interest of the per- 

 •son who is examining the specimen to which it is attached; to call his 

 attention to the points which it is most important that he should observe; 

 to give him the information which he most needs while looking at the 

 specimen, and to refer him to the books by means of which he can, if so 

 disposed, learn all that is known upon the subject illustrated. 



6. The art of label writing is in its infancy, and there are doubtless 

 possibilities of educational results through the agency of labels and speci- 

 mens which are not as yet at all understood. It is clear, however, that 

 the advice of the old cook in regard to making soup applies equally well 

 to a good label; that "its merit depends much more on what you leave 

 out than on what you put in." The value of this method of instruction 

 is perhaps better understood by the most advanced writers of .school text- 

 books and dictionaries than even by the average museum worker. 



Comment. — In Doctor Edward Egglestoii's new School History of ttie United 

 States engravings, portraits, pictures of historical localities, costumes, and archse 

 ological objects, are interspersed through the text, and each of these has a label of 

 the museum type surrounded by rules and separated from the text, with which it 

 has usually only general relationship. The originals which are thus illustrated, if 

 brought together, would make an admirable museum of American history, and the 

 book itself could hardly be improved upon as a handbook to such a collection. The 

 modern illustrated dictionary owes much of its success to the adoption of museum 

 methods, due perhaps to the fact that so many men familiar with nuiseum methods 

 have been engaged upon the preparation of the latest American publication of this 

 kind, the Century Dictionary, and the more recentl}' published Standard Dictionary. 

 These works thus impart instruction b}' methods very similar to those in use in 

 musevims, except that they are much at a disadvantage by reason of their alphabetical 

 arrangement. This is, of course, one respect in which the museum exhibition case 

 has the advantage over the lecturer who can only present one subject at a time, or 

 over the writer of books who is prevented by the size of his pages from bringing a 

 large number of ideas into view at once. This difficulty has been in part overcome 

 by the editor of the Standard Dictionary, in the great plates where are shown in one 

 case all the principal varieties of precious stones; in another plate all the races of 

 the domesticated dog; in another, the badges of orders of chivalry. Even this, 

 however, is far from reaching the possibilit}' possessed by the museum, with its 

 broad expanses of exhibition cases, of showing a large number of objects so arranged 

 as to explain their mutual relationship, and so labeled as to explain the method of 

 arrangement. 



