COMMEMORATION ADDRESS TES, 
study, the first impression upon entering the Museum is of its immense 
utility as a place of popular entertainment, recreation and instruction,— 
recreation of the most innocent and ennobling kind, for who ever heard of an 
immoral naturalist, and how could the most casual study of any single thing 
on exhibition here fail to exalt and elevate the mind and heart? ‘That 
splendid lecture room, filled to overflowing day after day and night after 
night with eager teachers and students listening keenly with delight and 
laying fast hold of instruction, not to let her go;— as the layman enters this 
vestibule, those wonderful visitors from other worlds, so mysterious and so 
as he rises from hall 

impressive, excite his imagination and amazement; 
to hall and from floor to floor, does he desire to know the history of his own 
race, from the days when Adam delved and Eve span up to that considerable 
civilization which had developed here before Columbus came, every step 
in the advance from the crudest flint instrument is spread out before him ;— 
would he see something of primitive animal life as recorded in the fossils of 
many succeeding ages, they are here; — does he incline to study the rocks 
and minerals and know how and where the most } recious stones are found, 
there is the marvellous Morgan collection of gems, so rich in variety and 
beauty that the cases containing them are surrounded by hundreds day by 
day;—is he curious to know how trees grow, there is the splendid Jesup 
collection of woods from all parts of America; — do the beauties and mysteries 
of insect life attract him, he is lost in the mazes of entomology;— is he a 

lover of birds, there they are in their native habitats, all true to life; would 
he know what mighty animals roamed the earth before Adam, let him gaze, 
awe-struck, on the brontosaurus, the mastodon and the dinosaurs in both 
kinds, and observe how Professor Osborn has learned to put hooks in the 
jaws of leviathans;— and would he see how woman in all ages has suffered 
for man, let him visit the copper woman, resting from her labors, immor- 
talized on earth; but his wonder grows as he gazes at her. Will she, who 
was once all flesh and blood, but long since transmuted into pure copper, — 
will she wake with the rest of us when the last trump sounds, or has she 
joined the mineral kingdom forever? 
The amusement of the people, however, was only an incident in Mr. 
Jesup’s lofty conception of the true mission of the Museum. He aimed at 
something far higher and nobler. His lofty purpose was to enlarge and 
extend the work which had been so well begun, to keep pace with the mar- 
vellous growth of the city, and develop the Museum not only into a great ed- 
ucational institution, imparting life and light to the people, but also, which 
in his mind was the chief object, to make it the home of true science, which 
should be the center of the scientific activities of the nation, so far as natural 
history was concerned,— and in all three of these objects his success was 
most remarkable. 
