11 AMERICAN MUSEUMS 37 



great systematic series of crowded specimens, arranged in 

 lofty halls and palatial galleries, which may excite wonder, 

 but which are calculated to teach no definite lesson. 



A grand opportunity is now afforded for a man of great 

 wealth, who wishes to do something for the intellectual 

 advancement of the masses. Let him build and endow a 

 " Museum of Comparative Palaeontology," for the purpose of 

 carrying out Agassiz's idea on a scale worthy of it. Such 

 a museum, built on the plan of that at Harvard, but with 

 rooms of a larger average size, would easily accommodate 

 the far larger number of spectators that would certainly 

 visit it, and would tend more than anything else could do 

 to raise the sciences of palaeontology and zoology in 

 popular estimation, and to clear away the clouds of mis- 

 understanding which still enshroud the grand theory of 

 evolution. It would enable the general public to 

 appreciate for the first time the marvellous story pre- 

 sented by the sequence of animal life upon the globe, and 

 would at once instruct and elevate the mind by exhibiting 

 the comparative insignificance of existing animals, in 

 variety and often in size, to those which have preceded 

 them, and by demonstrating the innumerable and startling 

 changes of the forms of life upon the globe during the long 

 series of ages which preceded the advent of man. Such 

 a museum would certainly become the most popular, as it 

 would be the most instructive, of all the great scientific 

 exhibitions yet established, while its founder would secure 

 to himself an amount of honourable fame rarely accorded 

 to those who devote money to public purposes. 



Museums of American Pre-historic Archmology. 



Few Englishmen have any adequate idea of the pre- 

 sent condition of the study of prehistoric archaeology in 

 America, or are at all aware of the vast extent and in- 

 teresting character of the collections which illustrate the 

 early history of that continent. The recognition of the 

 antiquity of man in Europe, and the establishment of 

 the successive periods characterized by the palaeolithic 



