244 Memorial of George Brozvn Goode. 



laboratory, as a part of the teaching equipment of the college and uni- 

 versity, and in the great cities cooperate with the public library as one 

 of the principal agencies for the enlightenment of the people. 



The true significance of the word museum may best be appreciated 

 through 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 in 

 central Asia. 



It has been well said that the early history of Greece is the first chap- 

 ter in 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 great Indo-Germanic or Aryan division of the world's 

 inhabitants. Long centuries before the invention of written languages 

 there lived along the borders of northern Greece, upon the slopes of 

 Mount Olympus and Helicon, a people whom the later Greeks called 

 "Thracians," a half-mythical race, whose language even has perished. 

 They survived in memory, we are told, as a race of bards, associated 

 with that peculiar legendary poetry of pre- Homeric date, in which the 

 powers of nature were first definitely personified. This poetry belonged, 

 presumably, to an age when the ancestors of the Greeks had left their 

 Indo-European home, but had not j^et taken full possession of the lands 

 which were afterwards Hellenic. The spirits of nature sang to their sen- 

 sitive souls with the voice of brook and tree and bird, and each agency 

 or form which their senses perceived was personified in connection with 

 a system of worship. There were spirits in every forest or mountain, 

 but in Thrace alone dwelt the Muses — the spirits who know and who 

 remember, who are the guardians of all wisdom, and who impart to their 

 disciples the knowledge and the skill to write. 



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 

 they were temples in various parts of Helles. Soon, however, the mean- 

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

 a school. Athenaeus, in the second century, described Athens as "the 

 museum of Greece," and the name was applied to that portion of the 

 palace of Alexandria which was set apart for the stud}' of the sciences 

 and which contained the famous Alexandrian library. The nutseum of 

 Alexandria was a great unversity, the abiding place of men of science 

 and letters, who were divided into many companies or colleges, for the 

 support of each of which a handsome revenue was allotted. 



The Alexandrian museum was burned 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 

 had also fallen into disfavor, and such, indeed, was the fact. 



