32 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 184. 



Brandenburg in Berlin, those of Paris, 

 Antwerp, Brussels, local museums of an- 

 tiquities, devoted to a country or race, or 

 era, as the Etruscan Museums at Florence 

 and Bologna, the Cairo, the Constantinople 

 and Athens museums; aud yet others per- 

 petuate the lives and achievements of great 

 men, as the Dante Museum in Florence, the 

 Goethe Museum in Weimar, the Beethoven 

 Museum in Bonn, while picture galleries 

 devoted to the works of artists, the rami- 

 fications of dynasty or family, the miscel- 

 lanies and relics of governors, generals, 

 statesmen, enmeshed within the historical 

 associations of one period, form still other 

 classes, as the collection in Old South 

 Church, Boston, the Kunst historisches Mu- 

 seum in Vienna, illustrating the history of 

 the Hapsburg, and the Musee Historique de 

 Versailles. 



The museum of science is that form of 

 the museum which now engrossingly at- 

 tracts notice, because this is the moment of 

 its highest development, and because sci- 

 ence, ceaselessly advancing with all the 

 abetting impulses of exploration at its com- 

 mand, is penetrating everywhere, and before 

 the solvent powers of its touch and its 

 genius the world, the universe and even 

 the life of man fall into orderly and 

 necessary arrays of evolutionary stages. 

 Science is the enduring sensation of our 

 day. The scientific museum embodies, 

 ■when perfectly realized, when meeting its 

 ideal requirements, the incarnation of the 

 scientific mind, that mind, at its best, in- 

 exorably calm and of almost incalculable 

 vision. 



The Scientific Museum, if I may venture 

 an epigram, is the expression of the Aris- 

 totelian mind. To the Stagyrite, in his clas- 

 sifying instinct, his analytical sagacity, so 

 prophetic of the modern spirit, the Museum 

 was doubtless a distinct idea. It would 

 seem, conscious as we are of the vivid in- 

 sight of the Aristotelian brain and its wise 



reliance on accumulation and comparison, 

 that we might fix the rise of the scientific 

 museum concept in his time, in his thought. 

 It was, indeed, the triumphs of Alexander 

 that awakened a profound movement of 

 questioning in the culture of Athens. The 

 new worlds, abounding in strange unheard 

 of, unimagined phenomena, with their 

 breadth of climate, novelty of scenery, pe- 

 culiarities of race, plants and animals, 

 which Alexander revealed, startled the in- 

 novating fancy of Greece with peculiar in- 

 terest. Humboldt, in his colossal grasp 

 of all the aspects of our planet, has written 

 of these events: "The extension of the sphere 

 of new ideas was owing to the magnitude 

 of the space made known, and to the variety 

 of climates manifested, from Cyropolis on 

 the Jaxartes (in the latitude of Tiflis and 

 Home), to the eastern delta of the Indus 

 at Tira, under the Tropic of Cancer. To 

 these we may further add the wonderful di- 

 versity in the configuration of the country, 

 ■which alternated in luxurious and fruitful 

 districts, in arid plains and snow- crowned 

 mountain ranges, the novelty and gigantic 

 size of animal and vegetable forms, the as- 

 pect and geographical distribution of races 

 of men of various color. * * * In no 

 age, excepting only the epoch of the dis- 

 covery and opening of tropical America, 

 eighteen centuries and a-half later, has 

 there been revealed, at one time and to one 

 race, a richer field of new views of nature 

 or a greater mass of materials for laying 

 the foundation of a physical knowledge of 

 the earth and of comparative ethnological 

 science." Again, this sublime philosopher 

 designates some scientific results of Alex- 

 ander's conquests in these words : " Besides 

 the knowledge of products which soon be- 

 came objects of universal commerce and 

 many of which were transported by the 

 SeleucidiB to Arabia, the aspect of a 

 richly embellished tropical nature speedily 

 yielded the Greeks enjoyments of another 



