36 Cincinnati Society of Natural Ilisforij 



She ought not to be satisfied to see any other city becoming the 

 representative metropohs of this section. 



The field of the museum is fourfold — Art, History, Science 

 and Industry. Not many American cities are ahead of Cin- 

 cinnati in Art, but a few are a long way ahead and some others 

 are gaining faster. In 1912 our Art Museum had an income 

 of $34,000 exclusive of the Academy, Vvhose receipts Avere nearly 

 $24,000. Beside Painting and Sculpture, this museum repre- 

 sents Indian Archeology, though it is not in position to push 

 this line aggressively. With this line and its armour and musical 

 instruments, this museum occupies a part of the Historical 

 field. 



Cincinnati's traditions and tastes in Art and Music are 

 yjriceless, Init unsleeping vigilance is the price of their con- 

 tinuance. Cultured people die and children are not born with 

 tastes for the Fine Arts. If Cincinnati aims to beat her rivals 

 she can do it better in the game of Music and Art than in the 

 population game. But as a man is generally vain with respect 

 to his weakest point, so a city seems sometimes possessed 

 to wage war where its own lines are weakest and the enemy 

 is strongest. The thing for the Cincinnati traveling man to 

 do is to post up on Music and Art and then tell the other fellow 

 when he has talked enough about the census. 



In most American historical museums the most important 

 thing is Indian Archeology. Our collections in this line, while 

 valuable, do not even approximately represent the knowledge 

 gained from even our* own immediate locality. It would not 

 have been extravagant to hope that Cincinnati might in this 

 respect have represented the Ohio Valley. Living as we do 

 at a kind of focus of prehistoric civilization which left abundant 

 remains, it is not creditable to this community that the student 

 of Ohio Valley Archeology must go to Columbus to make a 

 fair beginning, and then to Washington, Boston, and perhaps 

 to England to examine the data of his science. For seventy- 

 five years Ohio has been a hunting ground for relics of the 

 stone age. About 1846 Squier and Davis made one of the 

 largest of such collections. It was stored for some time in the 



