THE MUSEUMS OF THE FUTURE,' 



By <;. Brown Goode, LL. 1>. 



There is an Oriental saying that the distance between car and eye is 

 small, but the difference between hearing and seeing very great. 



More terse and not less forcible is our own proverb, "To see is to 

 know." which expresses a growing tendency in the human mind. 



In this busy, critical, and skeptical age, each man is seeking to know 

 all things, and life is too short for many words. The eye is used more 

 and more, the ear less and less, and in the use of the eye, descriptive 

 writing is set aside for pictures, and pictures in their turn are replaced 

 by actual objects. In the school-room the diagram, the blackboard, and 

 the object-lesson, unknown thirty years ago, are universally employed. 

 The public lecturer uses the stereopticon to re-enforce his words, the 

 editor illustrates his journals and magazines with engravings a. hun- 

 dred-fold more numerous and elaborate than his predecessor thought 

 needful, and the merchant and manufacturer recommend their wares 

 by means of vivid pietographs. The local fair of old has grown into 

 the great exposition, often international and always under some gov- 

 ernmental patronage, and thousands of such have taken place within 

 forty years, from Japan to Tasmania, and from Norway to Brazil. 



Amid such tendencies, the museum, it would seem, should find con- 

 genial place, for it is the most powerful and useful auxiliary of all sys- 

 tems of teaching by means of object lessons. 



The work of organizing museums has not kept pace with the times. 

 The United States is far behind the spirit of its own people, and less 

 progressive than England, Germany, Frauce, Italy, or Japan. We 

 have, it is true, two or three centers of great activity in museum work, 

 but there have been few new ones established within twenty years, and 

 many of the old are in a state of torpor. This can not long continue. 

 The museum of the past must be set aside, reconstructed, transformed 

 from a cemetery of bric-a-brac into a nursery of living thoughts. The 

 museum of the future must stand side by side with the library and the 

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

 versity, and in the great cities co-operate with the public binary as one 

 of the principal agencies for the enlightenment of the people. 



\ lecture delivered before the Brooklyn Institute, Februarj 28, 1889. 



