GENERAL PAPERS 105 
No department of the museum can exceed this in importance or 
fascination nor afford a better opportunity to show what men 
know and what they are discovering. These form the divisions 
of general geology, paleontology, mineralogy and petrography. 
Similarly a successful museum represents what physicists 
and engineers know and can do. In such a museum instead of 
a constant repetition of signs reading “Hands off,’ “Do not 
touch the objects,” etc., one reads such signs as this: “Turn on 
the light and see a magnificant spectrum,” “Touch button to 
obtain view of axial figures,’ “When lighted these specimens 
show marked fluorescence,” “Turn the button and start the 
machinery,” ete. 
No department of a museum could be more attractive than 
that which concerns itself with the knowledge and accomplish- 
ments of our physicists. 
Very interesting, too, would be the departments of chemistry, 
of astronomy, of the manufacturing arts and of the fine arts. 
All of these and of those mentioned before have the common 
purpose of speaking in a voice perpetually audible and readily 
understandable concerning the ever increasing fund of knowl- 
edge of our investigators and artists in all departments of 
human endeavor. 
A survey of these few points impresses us with the wealth of 
material upon which a museum can draw. If it is a poor un- 
interesting place it certainly would not be because of lack of 
subject matter but because of lack of energy, of imagination or 
of money on the part of the officers or workers in whose keeping 
the institution is placed. 
A museum is then a voice announcing the valuable work of 
our men of science. It speaks with no discordant note, with no 
attempt to silence or minimize other voices, but to swell their 
volume and to add to them becoming an extra voice as of one 
crying in the wilderness, “Behold the attainments of science 
and the coming of the hosts of knowledge.” 
