REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 35 



few years that scientific men have begun to collect and publish 



in methodical form the life histories of birds and other ani- 

 mals, and it is believed that they are beginning to take an 

 increased interest in reducing the results of their researches 

 to popular form for the entertainment and instruction of the 

 larger public, on whose support with Congress, the pecuniary 

 means for higher learning itself must also depend. 



With regard to this, the Secretary will quote from a previ- 

 ous report to the effect that "if the first purpose of a museum 

 be for the increase of original knowledge by investigation 

 and research, its second purpose is to entertain as well as to 

 instruct." 



The Secretary has elsewhere quoted the definition of an 

 educational museum as "a collection of instructive labels, 

 each illustrated by a well-selected specimen.-' It is believed 

 that the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution has 

 led in the practice of making its labels generally instructive; 

 and yet it may be properly asked whether the labels in the 

 collections even in our own Museum, or in almost any other, 

 are a collection of instructive labels for the general public. 



The Secretary expresses the wish that still further progress 

 in this direction of instructing and interesting the public may 

 be made, and he suggests, as one legitimate means of doing it, 

 not any change in the present labels or in the Latin names of 

 the specimens, which should always remain, but an addition to 

 each, or at least to the labels of the more popularly interest- 

 ing specimens, giving briefly in English some characteristic, 

 and if possible some interesting characteristic, of the specimen 

 in question. 



Again repeating that the first purpose of the Museum is to 

 aid investigation and research, and that this will always have 

 his first attention, he recalls that there is a subordinate but 

 most valuable purpose, and he wishes to say now what has 

 been increasingly in his mind for years, that he would feel he 

 had been promoting a most useful work if he could be the 

 means of inducing all museums to systematically add to exist- 

 ing labels (on at least all the most interesting or characteristic 

 specimens) something which would bring their subject within 

 the reach of the unlearned public. 



