ii AMERICAN MUSEUMS 25 



prevail in the animal kingdom, and of thus teaching 

 some of the most important lessons to be derived from the 

 study of nature. It constitutes of itself a typical museum 

 of animal life, and is more really instructive, as well as 

 more interesting, than many museums which contain ten 

 times the number of specimens and occupy far greater 

 space. It may serve as a model of the kind of room which 

 should form part of every local museum of Natural 

 History, leaving all the remaining available space for the 

 purpose of giving a complete representation of the local 

 fauna and flora. 



The visitor now ascends to the third floor, which is 

 wholly devoted to exhibition rooms. He first enters the 

 largest room in the building (about seventy feet by forty), 

 in which is arranged a systematic collection of mammalia, 

 of sufficient extent to exhibit all the chief modifications 

 of form and structure without confusing the spectator by 

 a vast array of closely allied species or badly preserved 

 specimens. A large gallery surrounds this room, devoted 

 to the systematic collection of reptiles, and on a level with 

 this gallery is suspended a very fine skeleton of the Fin- 

 back whale, about sixty feet long, in a position to be 

 thoroughly inspected both from below and above. The 

 other prominent objects are fine specimens, with skeletons, 

 of the American bison, the giraffe, and the camel ; skele- 

 tons of each of the five great races of man, and of the 

 three chief types of anthropoid apes ; and some casts of 

 the large extinct Australian marsupials in the same cases 

 with the skeletons of their comparatively small modern 

 representatives. Four other rooms, each of the standard 

 size forty feet by thirty are devoted to a similar repre- 

 sentative collection of birds, fishes, mollusca, and polyps, 

 respectively ; while in galleries over these rooms are the 

 collections of batrachians, Crustacea, insects and worms, 

 echinoderms, acalephs, and sponges. The most striking 

 objects here are, perhaps, in the bird room, a grand skele- 

 ton of the Dinornis maximus, as compared with that of 

 an ostrich ; in the molluscan room, a model of the giant 

 squid or calamary of Newfoundland, about twenty feet 

 long, with two arms thirty feet in length, their dilated 



