1 20 Staten Island Association of Arts and Sciences 



of the people and to afford the scientific student every means of 

 examining and studying the specimens which the museum corf- 

 tains." And thirty years later our own Dr. Goode wrote that 

 " A museum is an institution for the preservation of those objects 

 which best illustrate the phenomena of nature and the works of 

 man and the utilization of these for the increase of knowledge 

 and for culture and enlightenment of the people." 



Now, if a museum fulfills its purposes as defined by Dr. Goode, 

 it seems to me that the question whether the public gets the 

 interest on its investment would be answered in the affirmative. 

 Even if it merely preserved a record of the life that with the 

 rapid march of civilization is being ruthlessly swept out of exist- 

 ence, would not the museum serve a good purpose and justify 

 its being? For nowadays the entire face of Nature is being 

 altered by the energy of man, and natural conditions are chang- 

 ing so rapidly that in many places the present generation has 

 little or no knowledge of what was there even fifty years ago. 



It is only three centuries since Henry Hudson sailed up New 

 York Bay — there are many edifices in Europe older than that, and 

 yet little remains of what was here then. The inhabitants — the 

 forests, to a considerable extent the very rocks themselves — have 

 disappeared, and the life that then abounded has disappeared 

 with them. And it is one of the purposes of a museum, one of 

 the purposes of this museum, to carefully gather and preserve all 

 objects that may aid in giving an idea of the life that was here 

 three centuries ago and to provide for the information of those 

 who will be here three centuries hence. 



But this museum of today is a great deal more than a place 

 where objects are merely preserved, it is an educational institu- 

 tion on a large scale, whose language may be understood by all, 

 an ever open book whose pages appeal not only to the scholar but 

 even to the man who cannot read. 



Its mission or one of its missions is to give the visitor a hint of 

 the many interesting things that are to be found close at hand, 

 to show their hidden meaning, in short to teach him to observe 

 and to think. 



