GENERAL PAPERS 103 
A DEFINITION OF A STATE MUSEUM 
A. R. Crook, Stare Museum 
Meager, ill kept, uninteresting collections of various sorts 
housed in some museums have so often made such a lasting im- 
pression upon visitors that those persons ever after have had 
an improper idea of what a museum in the proper sense 
should be. 
Such has been the experience of the Illinois State Museum 
which for many years was so poorly cared for that the impres- 
sion which it made upon legislators was an unfavorable one. 
The definition which these men would give for a museum is 
totally different from the one which I would emphasize. And 
since they never visit this museum now and are unacquainted 
with any other, there is no hope of their ever bringing out a 
revised edition of their definition. 
I would define a museum as an “institution designed for the 
collection, preservation, investigation and display of objects 
which illustrate in concrete and tangible form the knowledge 
and skill that men have in science, in art, in manufacture and 
in business,” and a State Museum is an institution which illus- 
trates in concrete and tangible form the things that men of 
science, of art and of business in the State know and can do. 
Thus it is a repository of ideas and of deeds rather than simply 
of objects. It illustrates at every turn the knowledge that men 
have. Instead of being a collection of things it is a collection 
of thoughts. 
The various departments in such a museum would be de- 
signed to graphically illustrate what men have discovered in 
those departments. The division of botany would be more than 
simply a herbarium—a collection of dead plants. Instead it 
would be so fitted as to point out what our botanists know 
about all kinds of vegetation in the State—what they have 
learned concerning appearance, life habits, relationships, nox- 
ious qualities, medicinal values and possible commercial utili- 
ties of the three or four thousand plants which grow in Illinois. 
Artists in glass and wax would build groups to depict the 
