THE MUSEUMS OF THE FUTURE. 445 



celaius, laces, medals, and metal work, appeal to the art museum ad- 

 ministrator through their decorations and graceful forms. For thru 

 uses he cares presumably nothing. As a consequence of this feeling, 

 only articles of artistic excellence have been saved, and much has gone 

 to destruction which would be of the utmost importance to those who 

 arc now studying the history of human thought in the past. 



( )n the other hand, there is much in art museums which might to much 

 better purpose be delivered to the ethnologist for use in his exhibition 

 cases. There is also much which the art-museums, tied as it often is to 

 traditionary methods of installation, might learn from the scientific 

 museums. 



Many of the arrangements in the European art collections are calcu- 

 lated to send cold shivers down the back of a sensitive visitor. The 

 defects of these arrangements have been well described by a German 

 critic, W. Burger. "Our museums," he writes, "are the veritable 

 grave-yards of art iu which have been heaped up, with a tumulous-like 

 proiniseuousness, the remains which have been carried thither. A 

 Venus is placed side by side with a Madonna, a satyr next to a saint. 

 Luther is iu close proximity to a Pope, a painting of a lady's chamber 

 next to that of a church. Pieces executed for churches, palaces, city 

 halls, for a particular edifice, to teach some moral or historic truth, de- 

 signed for some especial light, for some well studied surrounding, all 

 are hung pell-mell upon the walls of some noncommittal gallery — a kind 

 of posthumous asylum, where a people, no longer capable of producing 

 works of art, come to admire this magnificient gallery of debris." 



Wlieu a museum building has been provided, and the nucleus of a col- 

 lection and an administrative staff are at hand, the work of museum- 

 bnilding begins, and this work, it is to be hoped, will not soon reach an 

 end. A finished museum is a dead museum, and a dead museum is a useless 

 museum. One thing should be kept prominently in mind by any organ- 

 ization which intends to found and maintain a museum, that the work will 

 never be finished, thai when the. collections cease to grow, they begin to 

 decay. A friend relating an experience iu South Kensington, said: " I 

 applied to a man who sells photographs of such edifices for picturesof 

 the main building. Be had none. 'What, no photographs of the South 

 Kensington Museum!' I exclaimed; with some impatience. 'Why, 

 sir,' replied the man, mildly, 'you see the museum doesn't stand still long 

 enough to be photographed.' And so indeed it seems," continued Mr. 

 Conway, "and this constant erection of new buildings and of new decora 

 lions on those already erected, is the physiognomical expression of the 

 new intellectual and aesthetic epoch which called the institution into ex- 

 istence, and is through it gradually climbing to results which no man 

 can foresee."' 



My prayer for the museums of the Tinted States and lor all othei 



similar agencies of enlightenment is this — that theymaj never cease to 

 increase. 



