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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVI. No. 933 



classes of the people, as for instance blind 

 people and kindergarten children. 



Special museums must serve the specialty 

 for which they are founded, and small mu- 

 seums also have to confine their work to a 

 narrower scope of educational endeavor. Pro- 

 vincial museums seldom have sufficient funds 

 to make world-wide investigations or teach all 

 subjects, and it is perhaps best for such a 

 museum to devote itself solely to its own 

 province or certain subjects. The same is also 

 true of a county, and in some cases a city, 

 museum. The university museum should 

 serve the purposes of the university, its stu- 

 dents and professors, that is, supply illustra- 

 tive material for classes, provide for the re- 

 search necessary to keep professors up to date, 

 and allow advanced students actual research 

 experience. In common honesty its funds 

 should not he used primarily for the general 

 public or for subjects outside the line of the 

 university's work. An art museum must con- 

 fine itself to esthetics or other branches of 

 art endeavor. A commercial museum of 

 course should keep its attention on work of a 

 commercial nature. It is evident that there 

 are many methods of museum administration, 

 each of them good in its own place and each 

 of them bad or even dishonest when out of 

 place. 



A museum building should be constructed 

 so that additions may be made to it without 

 ruining its architecture or causing unneces- 

 sary expense for remodeling or making con- 

 nections. Such a building should be built 

 with a view to its purpose so that the labora- 

 tories, offices, exhibition halls and the like may 

 be properly lighted and each suitable for its 

 special kind of work. In the past museums 

 have usually been built to please an architect 

 and the result is that most museum buildings 

 are abominably adapted to the use of the mu- 

 seum and its staif. The day must soon come 

 when museum buildings will be constructed 

 with a view to the purpose for which they are 

 to be used and then the result of museum 

 work will be even more worth while than at 

 present. 



No matter what the scientific investigator 

 and the teacher may say, one of the justifiable 

 purposes of a museum is to give recreation 

 and happiness to great masses of the people 

 and by far the greater number of visitors to 

 the large museums drop in casually for just 

 these purposes. Very few of them come to be 

 educated or to carry on research, but from the 

 casual visits many people carry away a desire 

 to investigate and still more to receive educa- 

 tional benefits. 



The educational section of a museum may 

 be likened to extra illustrated text-books. For 

 instance in text-books on birds, we may have 

 pictures of birds, even colored pictures, but in 

 a museum we have the actual birds, their 

 skeletons, their organs, their nests and their 

 eggs. Thus a large collection of birds in a 

 good educational museum is like a great text- 

 book on birds illustrated by these things, while 

 the labels take the place of the printed matter 

 in the text-book. Educational popularization 

 should never be carried to the extreme of exag- 

 geration and untruthfulness affected by cer- 

 tain schools of museum employees. 



A museum may also serve as a great ware- 

 house where are kept such valuable things as 

 individuals should not horde in their homes. 

 For instance an object from which something 

 may be learned, and which is the only object 

 of its kind in the world, should not be kept in 

 a home where it may be destroyed by fire, but 

 in a fireproof museum; nor ought it to be 

 where its ovTner and his friends are the only 

 ones able to see it, but it should be available 

 for all who may desire benefit from it, whether 

 they be citizens of the province or nation 

 owning the museum, or visitors from the most 

 distant lands. No museum should be a collec- 

 tion of merely curious things. 



Sometimes animals, plants and the like are 

 exhibited surrounded by representations of 

 their natural home and in front of a painting 

 representing the country in which they occur. 

 Such exhibits depend for their excellence on 

 the skill of the scientist who plans them, the 

 collector who secures the material and artists 

 and mechanics of various kinds. Each of 



