428 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1889. 



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 yet taken full possession of the lands 

 which were afterward Hellenic. The spirits of nature sang to their 

 sensitive souls with the voice of brook aud tree and bird, and each 

 agency or form which their senses perceived was personified in connec- 

 tion 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 im- 

 part 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 meaning of the word changed, and it was used to describe a place 

 of study, or a school. Atheuseus 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 study 

 of the sciences aud which contained the famous Alexandrian library. 

 The museum of Alexandria, was a great university, the abiding place 

 of men of science aud 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 institu- 

 tion, 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. 



The history of museum and library runs in parallel lines. It is not 

 until the development of the arts aud sciences has taken place, until an 

 extensive written literature has grown up, and a distinct literary and 



