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THrAUSTRALIAM MUSEUM 



MAGAZINE 



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Published bii the Australian Masraiii 

 Editor: C. Andkrson. TNI. A.. D.Sc 



- College Street, Sijdnei/. 

 Anmial Snl)scripti()n, Pust Free, 4/4. 



VOL. 1. No. 4. 



MARCH, Uri-I. 



Editorial. 



A iiuiseum must either go forward 

 or retrograde; there is no standing still, 

 for, as the late G. Brown Goode, of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, 

 said in an oft-quoted j-tassage, "One 

 thing should be kept in mind l)y any 

 organisation which intends to found and 

 maintain a museum, that the work will 

 never be finished, that when the collec- 

 tions cease to grow they begin to de- 

 cay. A finished ranseum is a dead 

 museum, and a dead museum is a use- 

 less museum." 



The Australian Museum has a dis- 

 tinguished past, thanks to the able ad- 

 ministrators who preceded us, but it 

 behoves us to look now to the future, 

 to keep our institution abreast of the 

 times scientifically, to advance in step 

 with similar institutions in other States 

 and countries, to use our utmost en- 

 deavours to see that the museum gives 

 the best possible service to the people 

 at whose expense it is maintained. 



In the first number of this Magazine 

 we have briefly set forth tlie purpose and 

 work of museums in general, and tlie 

 Australian Museum in particular, and we 

 shall not now enlai'ge on these, but we 

 would again empliasize the fact that 

 museums have two main objects, name- 

 ly, to serve as storehouses for collec- 

 tions which have formed or will form 

 the subject matter of scientific investi- 

 gation, and, secondly, to interest and 



insti'uct the general public. It will 1)0 

 obvious that to fulfil these functions 

 there nuist be ever increasing accommo- 

 dation, for collections never decrease in 

 size, but, on the contrary, are always 

 being augmented. Thus, in the matter 

 of space, museums, like the daughters 

 of the horse-leech, are ever crying "give, 

 give," and we propose to set forth some 

 of the reasons why this question is an 

 urgent one in the case of our own 

 museum. 



The museum buildings are over- 

 crowded. The exhil)ition galleries are 

 of course filled to repletion, and new 

 exhibits can be introduced only by re- 

 moval of others. This may not l)e en- 

 tirely a misfortune, for few exhibits are 

 so fine that they cannot be replaced by 

 better, but the most attractive and in- 

 structive exhil)its are ethnological and 

 faunal groups, and these require much 

 more space for their effective display 

 than do series of mere specimens. We 

 hope to instal a number of such groups 

 in the near future, but we are sadly 

 handicapped by lack of space and other 

 facilities. 



A "type" room, in which a carefully 

 selected series of specimens and pre- 

 parations illustrates the divisions of the 

 animal kingdom and the basis of zoologi- 

 cal classification, is of immense ser- 

 vice to students, but at present there 

 is no gallery suitable for this purpose 



