13.S THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



this rapid period of transition and radicalism, most of the things displayed 

 in our collections now belong to the past and have become, so to speak, 

 antiquities all of a sudden overnight. For example, it would be impossible 

 at the present time to duplicate the collections of armor, because the 

 military examinations in which all these weapons were formerly employed 

 have been abolished for a number of years, and the makers of them have 

 consequently run out of business. In 1902 I chanced to meet but one man 

 in a suburb of Peking, capable of manufacturing bows, arrows, cross-bows 

 and halberds in compliance with the official regulations; and all para- 

 phernalia required in the training by the competitors for military posts 

 could then be procured even in complete sets only with a large amount 

 of labor, study and time. These now represent precious records of the 

 past whose primary ethnological importance cannot be underrated. In the 

 same manner, costumes, personal ornaments, kitchen and household uten- 

 sils, furniture, coins, weights and measures, means of heating and lighting, 

 means of transportation, games and sports, religious customs have rapidly 

 changed or wholly disappeared under the influence of the intruding foreign 

 ideas. The flag of the new republic will doubtless complete this great 

 movement and have many other surprises in store for us. 



Chinese collections, and especially the very complete collection in the 

 American Museum, ha^'e thus become of historical significance in that they 

 are illustrative of the life of imperial China of bygone days. In the present 

 stage of our political, commercial and industrial relations with the East, 

 everything that pertains to China seems to us of paramount importance, 

 practical and theoretical. If the manufacturers of this country had taken 

 the trouble to study the native industries of the Chinese and their products 

 in museum collections with a view to adapting our manufactures to their 

 peculiar needs, American business with China would have assumed much 

 larger dimensions. But we are confronted with more ideal tasks than that : 

 if fate has treated us kindly in presenting us with a share of the big inheritance 

 of Chinese culture, it seems to me it becomes also our moral obligation in 

 the interest of the living and the future generations, to preserve the record 

 of this story in the memory of man. Ethnologists are a life-saving crew 

 which have the duty of rescuing perishing cultures and peoples from wreck. 

 When China shall take her place among the nations of the world, the time 

 will also come that students will flock to our museums to study her ancient 

 culture .seriously, and that Chinese collections made in the past will be 

 treated with the same respect as are now Siebold's Japanese collection in 

 Holland or the Cook Polynesian collection in London. 



Editor's Note: Dr. IJcrthold LaufcT, Oriental oxploriT and scholar, is curator of East 

 Asiatic caiinology in tiio Field Musinirn of Natural History, Chicago. I'^roni I!)()l to 1004 lie 

 was leader of a C^hinese expedition for the Ani(!rican Museum of Natural History, carried on 

 under the auspices of the East Asiatic Committee witii .Jacob H. Schilf the cliief supporter. 

 This time he gathered together the largest and most representative collection ever brought 

 out of China. 



