CHAPTER XXIX. 



MUSEUMS AND THEIE USES I WITH SOME OBSERVATIONS ON TAX- 

 IDERMY. 



N this country, as in many other parts of the world, 

 nearly all of our kirge cities support one or more muse- 

 ums, of one kind or another. Sometimes, too, we have 

 private museums often built by some wealthy indi- 

 vidual and devoted to the containment of special collections. 

 Occasionally the public are given, upon certain days, access to 

 these latter, and rarely is any charge made therefor. Whatever 

 their pretensions may be, whether great or small, museums are 

 the material manifestations of a variety of human desires. A col- 

 lection of objects may be gotten together simply to gratify a 

 taste to amass specimens of things curious, without any regard to 

 instructive aims, classification, or naming by a system of labels. 

 There seems to be an ever-present craving on the part of the pub- 

 lic to see the unnatural, the odd, the uncanny, and the so-called 

 freaks of nature. This trait is frequently taken advantage of by 

 the mercenary, and collections are made simply to gratify it, with 

 the sole purpose in view on the part of the collector or collectors 

 to reap the pecuniary income derived from the enterprise. A 

 large part of Barnum's success lay along upon these lines, ex- 

 ploited as they were, in his early days in Xew York City, upon a 

 basis of unrivaled x»roportions. In the same category fall the 

 pseudo-museums of anatomy, often, too, developed upon a grand 

 scale, and in which are exhibited by life-size models every object 

 inclined to gratify the taste for the morbid, the predilection for 

 all that is horrible, and the gratification in a visual way, of all 

 Unit is unchaste, and savors of pruriency. Apropos to this as- 

 pect of my subject, I would say that for many years past the 

 War Department at Washington, I). C, has supported, upon a 

 broad and extended basis, an Army Medical Museum, devoted to 

 the exhibition of army surgery; anatomy, both pathological and 

 normal; and, in short, anything scientifically illustrating the 

 medical sciences. Years ago, I held the position of a curator in 

 that museum, and was thus enabled to study the great number of 



