REPORT OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY. 11 



understanding of the public needs. He labored earnestly and con- 

 scientiously to make this a museum for as well as of the people, and 

 the plans now being carried out are, in all their essential features, of 

 his making-. While the assistants might be relied upon to arrange and 

 maintain the study series in a manner acceptable to the specialist, the 

 interests of the public always remained in his immediate charge. He 

 was ever occupied in devising ways for so presenting the features of 

 nature and the activities of mankind that by the very force of his sur- 

 roundings the visitor was bound to receive and carry with him some 

 definite impression, some new bit of knowledge. Doctor Goode's 

 labors in this held ranged from the planning of the general scheme to 

 the most minute details of case architecture and fittings. His official 

 connection with nearly all the important expositions of the past quar- 

 ter of a century and his exhaustive studies of all the principal museums 

 of Europe and the United States gave him exceptional opportunities 

 for observation and experiment. Though a young man when he died, 

 none other had acquired so ripe an experience and none is more worthy 

 of being followed. 



An incidental, though very popular, educational feature of the 

 Museum, having for its purpose the promotion of scientific teaching 

 throughout the country, has been the distribution to schools and col- 

 leges of its duplicate specimens, properly identified and labeled, and 

 put up in carefully selected sets. Inadequate means have prevented 

 this measure from being carried out on the scale which the resources 

 of the Museum would admit of, but many hundreds of such sets have 

 already been given away. 



Scarcely a year passes that some exposition, either at home or 

 abroad, is not occupying the attention of the Museum, and through 

 this means its existence and aims are brought constantly and promi- 

 nently before the public. These expositions have of late followed one 

 another so closely, and have required such extensive preparations, as 

 to interfere greatly with the ordinary work of the Museum, but the 

 practice of introducing new and varied features, of showing a fresh 

 series of objects or improved groupings in connection with each one, 

 insures a substantial gain, when the collections are returned to Wash- 

 ington, besides fulfilling the important function of making museum 

 methods known to the people of the United States and stimulating 

 the growth of museums in many quarters. 



Though mainly technical and most useful to the investigator, the 

 publications of the Museum can be classed, in a general way. as 

 belonging to its educational side, being the medium through which 

 the nature and extent of its collections are made known. The Annual 

 Report, first printed as a separate volume of the Smithsonian Report 

 in 1884, and now in its twentieth volume, consists, besides the admin- 

 istrative part, mainly of semipopular papers on interesting portions of 



