COMMEMORATION ADDRESS 15 
All the while the trustees and their friends had been besieging the legis- 
lature to come to their aid, as every day made it more and more obvious that 
it was quite impossible to build up by private means alone a great museum 
which should be worthy to compete with the great museums of Europe, 
which were supported almost wholly by public monies. ‘To show how 
modest our aspirations then were, a great petition signed by forty thousand 
citizens was presented to the Legislature, asking that a single building should 
be erected at the expense of the city for the joint occupation of the museum 
of natural history and the museum of art, which at the same time was strug- 
gling into being and leading a sickly and precarious existence in private 
quarters, and sustained largely by the same generous donors. 
It was at this period of promising progress and of great struggles under 
heavy burdens that the ten years’ administration of our second president, 
that generous and public spirited merchant prince, Robert L. Stuart, began, 
during which the Museum, fostered by public aid and private munificence. 
grew into a valued and well-recognized educational establishment. 
This epoch of steady progress was ushered in by the allotment by the 
Legislature of the Deer Park on the east side of Central Park for the use of 
the Museum of Art, and of Manhattan Square, then a remote and almost 
inaccessible waste land, for the Museum of Natural History, and the appro- 
priation of adequate sums for the erection of a suitable building for each on 
those respective localities, a most auspicious inauguration of a public policy 
which provided for the possible growth of each institution in the indefinite 
future (Manhattan Square alone consisting of eighteen acres) a policy 
which has already resulted in the expenditure of nearly five millions of 
dollars by the city under legislative authority in the erection of these magni- 
ficent buildings for the housing of our collections, upon which private benefi- 
cence has expended an equal amount. And the same may be said of the 
Museum of Art. 
On the second of June, 1874, the corner stone of our first building, de- 
signed by Calvert Vaux, as one section of a stupendous plan to cover a large 

portion — nearly the whole — of the entire square, was laid with imposing 
ceremonies in the presence of the President of the United States, accompanied 
by members of his cabinet, the Governor of the State and the Mayor of the 
City. On the twenty-second of December, 1877, the building was opened 
with similar ceremonies in the presence of the same august personages. 
Professor Marsh and President Eliot made admirable addresses, the latter 
concluding his impressive exhortation to courage and progress by quoting 
the last words of Moses before he went up on the top of Pisgah to see the 
promised land which he was not to enter, ‘‘The Eternal God is thy refuge, 
and underneath are the everlasting arms.” 
