CHAPTER XXIII 

 MUSEUMS 



THE word "museum" is not one of those which 

 explain themselves and give an indication of what 

 the thing to which they are applied should be, when it 

 has ceased to be what it was intended to be. In ancient 

 Greece the word " mouseion " meant " the place of the 

 Muses " a grove or a temple and there was such a 

 place on a part of the Acropolis of Athens, the rocky 

 temple-crow r ned hill around which the city was built. 

 There were other " museums," or seats of the Muses, in 

 ancient Greece ; those on the slopes of Mount Helicon 

 and of Mount Olympus were the most famous. In 

 modern times a picture gallery and art collection, that of 

 the Louvre, in Paris, is called " the Musee," whilst " the 

 Museum " (the Latin form of the same word) is the name 

 distinctively applied in Paris to the collections of natural 

 history and the laboratories connected with them in the 

 Jardin des Plantes. In London " the British Museum," 

 founded in 1753, originally comprised the national library 

 as well as collections of antiquities and of natural history. 

 In Heidelberg "the Museum" was the name, when I was 

 there, for a delightful club, with a garden. It belonged 

 to the professors, their families, and their friends in the 

 town, and concerts and dances were given in it. It 

 seems that the Heidelberg " Museum " comes nearest to 



