Director's Report for 1915 



Although the Annual Reports of this Museum are primarily 

 intended to record the activities of the staff and the apparent 

 results of their work during the year, they must also serve as brief 

 chapters in the history of our institution which has now passed 

 the first quarter century of its existence, and in view of the 

 lamented death of its founder on June 7, 1915, it may be permitted 

 me to briefly review the connection of Charles Reed Bishop with 

 the Museum to which he gave the name of his beloved wife, \^ho 

 died October, 1884. 



Dr. Charles McEwan Hyde, afterward secretary of the Museum 

 Trustees, should be credited with the earliest suggestion of a 

 museum of Hawaiian material, and Dr. Hyde's proposal was 

 eagerly seconded by Honorable Sanford Ballard Dole, afterwards 

 president of the Museum Trustees, and Mr. Bishop was inclined 

 to follow out a part of the suggestion. When the project took 

 form in Mr. Bishop's mind for the erection of a memorial museum 

 in the midst of the premises of the schools Bernice Pauahi had 

 founded, Mr. Dole wrote to me (then living in Boston), noting 

 the importance of having it a general museum of things Polynesian, 

 and situated in the town, as there were then no easy means of 

 getting to the rather out of the way schools. In reply I urged the 

 former residence of the Bishops, built by Paki, Haleakala, on King 

 Street, as a suitable site for such a museum, and suggested the 

 inclusion of the existing Government Museum in the Judiciary 

 Building, but Mr. Bishop was not then ready to adopt the more 

 elaborate plan, and clung to the idea of a somewhat private and 

 limited museum to preserve the combined Pauahi and Emma 



treasures (still the most important Hawaiian collection in the 



[119] 3 



