3i8 MUSEUMS 



time shown intelligence and laboured to make museums 

 not only plaees of enjoyment and "edification," but also 

 the means of increasing knowledge and rendering service 

 to the State. But the scope of our public museums, and 

 the principles and methods by which it may be realised, 

 have never been agreed upon, and consequently are not 

 definitely recognised by the State nor by the curiously 

 ill-chosen committees of managers, or trustees, to whose 

 tender mercies the ultimate control of these institutions is 

 confided — apparently by haphazard or misapprehension. 



The notion of a town corporation, or of the central 

 government at this or that date, has been that museums 

 are best controlled and public money expended in con- 

 nection with them by persons who know nothing about 

 the real importance of the collections, and receive no 

 guidance from any scheme or statutable declaration of 

 specific purpose drawn up by a competent authority. I 

 will endeavour to state what those purposes should be. 



When one tries to estimate what is really the value to 

 the community of public " museums," one is led inevitably 

 to the conclusion that their most important purpose — 

 whether they are museums of natural history, of antiqui- 

 ties, or of art — is to serve as safe and permanent 

 "repositories" (the old word used in the British Museum 

 Act of 1753) for specimens which are costly and difficult 

 to obtain — not to be either " picked up " or readily 

 " housed " by everybody, and at the same time of real 

 importance as " records." The first and most command- 

 ing duty of those who set up and maintain a public 

 museum is to preserve actual things as records — records of 

 the existence in this or that locality of each kind of plant 

 and animal, records of the former existence of extinct plants 

 and animals, with irrefragable certainty as to the locality 

 and the exact strata in which they were found — records of 

 prehistoric man, his weapons and art, and of the animals 



