SO THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 
Coming to the presidency in the very prime of manhood, with ample 
fortune achieved, and the rich experience of a great business life behind him, 
he bestowed upon the Museum not only generous gifts, constantly repeated, 
but what was far better, he gave it the best twenty-five years of his life, and 
all the rich powers of his generous and large-hearted nature. Stimulated 
by his enthusiasm and his example, the trustees and friends of the institution 
rallied to its support, and so rapidly did its collections grow, that the Legisla- 
ture and the City, recognizing its rapidly growing needs, added every four 
years a new section, a new and noble building to the original edifice, so as to 
complete already about two fifths of Vaux’s original plan, which in 1869 the 
trustees had had the far-sighted audacity to adopt and approve. I do not 
hesitate to say that the money spent by the city in the development of this 
Museum and the Museum of Art is the best investment of public monies 
ever made by it, whether we consider the direct benefit to the people, or 
the prestige and character attained by the city as the 
center of knowledge and culture. 
great metropolitan 
The appetite of the people for what they could learn here grew by what 
it fed on. The establishment of the Department of Public Instruction, and 
the erection of a new and complete lecture hall, afforded facilities for educa- 
tion which were largely availed of and widely appreciated. The daily 
attendance rapidly multiplied, and the people showed their growing love 
of what they justly regarded as their own free pleasure ground, 
Mr. Jesup’s generous nature broadened rapidly and constantly with the 
growth of the work which had come to his hands, not only as to the scope of 
its objects, but as to the spirit in which it should be administered. This 
was never better illustrated than in the matter of Sunday opening. At first, 
and for many years, with the large majority of the trustees, he was utterly 
opposed to it from early training and prejudice, but as the demand grew, 
the subject was more carefully considered, and he and those who thought 
with him yielded, having become satisfied that to look through nature up to 
nature’s God was the best way of spending a portion of the Sabbath, and 
both he and William E. Dodge, who sympathized with him, and who was one 
of our most valuable and generous trustees, assured me afterwards that this 
was the best step forward that the Museum had ever taken. 
Mr. Jesup’s extraordinary enthusiasm for science and his sympathetic 
admiration for scientific men, though having little knowledge of science 
himself, was the most striking feature of his career as President, and wholly 
unexpected, because he had given up his life before to business and affairs. 
As he said himself in the report of the trustees for 1886, ‘It is a difficult task 
to estimate the money value of what belongs to science and scientific in- 
stitutions. ‘lo their value must be added their ameliorating power, their 
