Z^ Drl'^Scharifl on 



grievously suffered from the eminent architect. Frequently he 

 had made the rooms too dark and overloaded them with 

 ornaments, utterly oblivious of the fact that no ornament of any 

 kind should be tolerated in the interior of a museuai, and that 

 light was the foremost of all essential qualities of the building. It 

 had been truly remarked that the value of a museum would not 

 be tested by its contents as a means of the advancement of 

 knowledge, but by the treatment of those contents. Hence the 

 making of a museum depended on the knowledge of the curator 

 and his ability to apply that knowledge. A museum was like a 

 living organism, it required continual and tender care. It must 

 grow or it would perish, and the cost and labour required to 

 maintain it in a state of vitality was not yet by any means fully 

 realised or provided for either in their great national establish- 

 ments or in their smaller local institutions. Proceeding, the 

 lecturer said he strongly urged upon any Museum Committee the 

 desirability of appointing a curator before the museum was built. 

 Let him then form the nucleus of a collection, and carefully study 

 the plans of all the more important modern museums, especially 

 as regarded space, lighting, and heating, so as to enable him to 

 aid in devising a proper scheme for housing the collections. The 

 scope of a museum should be strictly defined. In a great 

 industrial city like Belfast, with its wonderful shipbuilding and 

 linen and other industries, it seemed to him very desirable that 

 some rooms in its museum should be set apart for an adequate 

 illustration of the rise, history, and progress of such industries. 

 In the case of the linen industry, the process of manufacture of 

 the cloth from the cultivation of the flax to the finished article 

 would form a series of valuable and most instructive exhibits. If 

 the preparation of the fibre and the various systems of heckling 

 formerly in use, and the latest machinery, as well as the spinning, 

 weaving, and bleaching in all their phases, and the manufacture 

 finally, were all properly and clearly demonstrated, it might be 

 possible to fill quite a large building without anything else. 



