Jdly 8, 1898.] 



SCIENCE. 



35 



lecturer or expounder and the investiga- 

 tor. These three present the rounded out- 

 line of its attitude to the visitor, the pupil 

 and the scientist. Let us examine these 

 aspects of its nature and economy. 



THE MUSEUM AS A COLLECTOB. 



The museum furnishes the most substan- 

 tial guarantee against the loss or scattering 

 of valuable specimens. It naturally in- 

 duces the deposit of private collections. It 

 becomes in a short time the refuge of all 

 sorts of cabinets, and, from the mutations 

 of circumstances in private fortunes, it 

 stands in the field as a desirable purchaser 

 of private treasures. So initially in the 

 ordinary development of the museum the 

 collections come first. The British Museum, 

 which now stands preeminent as the most 

 complete embodiment of the museum idea, 

 began its career with such a nucleus in the 

 Cottonian manuscripts, coins, medals and 

 antiquities, the Arundel and Harleian 

 manuscripts, and the Sloane collection of 

 natural history, antiquities and books. The 

 National Museum of the United States, 

 which developed within the franchises and 

 purposes of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 came into material objectivitj' with the col- 

 lections, mostly minerals, of Smithson him- 

 self, to which ensuing years brought large 

 additions from the Pacific Exploring Ex- 

 pedition, Perry's Expedition to Japan, 

 the Pacific Eailroad Survey, the Mexican 

 Boundary Survey, the Surveys of the Army 

 Engineer Corps and the Centennial Exhibi- 

 tion of 1876. 



The Field Museum of Chicago sprang into 

 sudden prominence from its huge heritage 

 or acquisition of the dismembered sections 

 and debris of the Chicago Fair, and our own 

 American Museum of Natural History vir- 

 tually was born when it was welcomed to 

 Central Park by Commissioner Green, and 

 deposited its collections in the old arsenal 

 at 64th Street and Fifth Avenue 'in 1869. 



Those walls, which had reverberated to the 

 martial grounding of arms in 1863, when 

 riot held the throat of New York in its 

 bloody fist, then witnessed a more peace- 

 ful invasion of birds and beasts, a silent 

 procession, from whose mute forms, as 

 named and classified, flow the tranquillizing 

 influences of study. 



The museum should also profitably invite 

 to itself the numerous men who have, by 

 accident or exploration, come into posses- 

 sion of beautiful or instructive objects. It 

 centralizes the divergent impulses of dis- 

 covery and brings into substantial impor- 

 tance the trader and dealer in natural 

 productions. It is a sea of reception into 

 which pour from all levels of observation 

 the specimens which illustrate faunas and 

 and floras and natural resources, mineral 

 wonders and curiosities. The purchase of 

 new objects, indeed the admission of new 

 material, must be guided by the best profes- 

 sional advice, professional advice also that 

 is known to be regulated by disinterested 

 motives. No material should be secured 

 which simply duplicates matter already on 

 exhibition for the meretricious reason of its 

 slightly greater elegance or splendor. Funda- 

 mentally museums as collectors are to in- 

 struct, though the esthetic sense, of course, 

 need not, on that account, be blunted or 

 suppressed. Indeed, it is true that the 

 most perfect things in nature are often the 

 most instructive, and, at any rate, exhibits 

 should challenge attention by their average 

 superficial beauty. So much is to l)e bought 

 and so much expended in all directions that 

 money is wasted by buying what is already 

 in evidence. 



The line of development in a natural 

 history museum cannot always be evenly 

 maintained in all departments. When 

 Zoology, Geology, Mineralogy, Ethnology 

 and Botany are located under the same roof 

 with interests enthusiastically defended by 

 as many groups of curators there is inevi- 



