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THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



size and shape, and of actual colonies of many types of useful and harmful bacteria 

 showing how mass cultures of the microbes look to the naked eye. 



The relation of insects to disease is a particularly fruitful field for museum work 

 and is the one upon which we are chiefly engaged at the present time. The American 

 Museum already has in its department of invertebrate zoology wonderful enlarged 

 models of mosquitoes and the department of public health has just installed a model 

 of the house-fly, enlarged forty diameters, which took its skilled artist-modeler, Mr. 

 Ignaz Matausch, nearly a year to complete. A wide series of facts bearing on the 

 life history of the fly are illustrated as well as the relation of the fly to disease, the 

 practical methods for its control and the results achieved thereby. A similar, but 

 more enlarged model of the flea (carrier of bubonic plague) is now under preparation 

 and we have already installed models, some small and some life size, dealing with the 

 rats which harbor the plague microbe and from which the flea carries it to man. The 



opportunity for future development 

 here, and in connection with the 

 mosquitoes of malaria and yellow 

 fever, and a score of other disease- 

 carriers, is a tempting one which we 

 hope to develop in the next few 

 years. 



This hall is our first opportunity 

 to serve the public schools in their 

 work of health education. They 

 bring their classes to the Museum 

 in one of the periods allotted to 

 civic biology and in an hour with 

 these models and diagrams learn 

 more than they could get from 

 books and lectures in a month. 



In addition to the hall, which is 

 open to all the visitors to the Mu- 

 seum (numbering eight hundred 

 thousand a year) , we arrange special 

 lectures to the school children on 

 the occasion of their visits. It is 

 the policy of the Museum to pro- 

 vide lectures (generally illustrated) 

 on any subject within its field for any teacher who may ask it and for any number 

 of pupils, from a score to a thousand. Or, if the teacher prefers to give the lecture 

 himself, we provide hall, lantern slides and operator. The larger high schools send 

 their classes twice a year near the end of each term for a talk on water or milk, or 

 insect-borne disease, city-cleaning or some other topic which fits into the course of 

 study at the time. 



New York is a large city however, and the children from many of the schools can 

 come to the Museum only a few times a year. It was necessary to get our illustrative 

 material into the schools themselves if it was really to be effective. For some time 

 the American Museum has taken an active part in the nature study work of the 

 public schools by circulating loan collections of birds, insects, mollusks, sponges, 

 corals, woods, minerals and the like. Over 500 of these cabinets circulated in 491 

 schools in 1912 reaching 1,275,890 children. Of this work President Osborn of the 

 Museum has said, "Step by step a great system of cooperation has been built up be- 

 tween the regular course work in the schools and the visual instruction in the Museum, 



How Disease is Prevented. . .Pasteurizing 

 means heating the milk to 150°-160° F. for 20 

 minutes. This does not injure the milk . . . but 

 kills all the germs of disease. . .Impure water 

 can be purified. . .by boiling it. Quoted from 

 American Museum School Chart 



