10 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, i 



The educational museum is of comparatively recent origin, and may 

 be said to be one of the outgrowths of the modern industrial expo- 

 sition. The World's Fair of London in 1851, the first of a long series 

 of international exhibitions, was utilized by the Government of Great 

 Britain as a starting-point for a number of national educational mu- 

 seums, the most perfect which have as yet been organized, and many 

 subsequent World's Fairs have been taken advantage of in a similar 

 manner, so that nearly every civilized country now has a system of 

 public museums. 



One of the results of the Philadelphia Exhibition of 1876 was that 

 it made plain to the people of the United States the educational 

 importance of great museums. It suggested the thought that if so 

 much that is inspiring and instructive can be imparted by the exhibi- 

 tion of natural and manufactured objects gathered together, chiefly 

 with commercial ends in view on the part of the exhibitors, neces- 

 sarily somewhat unsystematically arranged and with little effort to- 

 ward labeling in an instructive manner, an immense field is open for 

 educating the public by gathering together a selected series of sim- 

 ilar objects, which may be so classified and explained by means of 

 labels and guide- Looks that they shall impart a consistent and sys- 

 tematic idea of the resources of the world and of human achieve- 

 ment. 



The United States has as yet no system of educational museums, al- 

 though there are several museums of limited scope, which have success- 

 fully carried out the educational idea iu the arrangement of their ma- 

 terials; for instance, the American Museum of Natural History in New 

 York, the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, the Museum 

 of the Peabody Academy of Sciences in Salem, the Philadelphia 

 Academy of Natural Sciences, the Boston Museum of Art, the Metro- 

 politan Museum of Art in New York, the Pennsylvania Museum of In- 

 dustrial Art, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology in Cambridge, the 

 Peabody Museum of Yale College, and the Boston Society of Natural 

 History. 



The same remark applies with equal force to the museums of Eu- 

 rope. There are, however, institutions, like the Museum of Practical 

 Geology, the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, the museums 

 at Bethnal Green and South Kensington, in London, the Museum of 

 Industrial Art at Berlin, the Ethnological Museum at Leipsic, the 

 National Museum of Germany at Nureinburg, the Bavarian National 

 Museum at Munich, and others, which have admirably carried out a 

 single idea, or a limited number of ideas, and which are marvelously 

 rich in material and arranged in a manner full of suggest iveness. 



The museum now under the charge of the Smithsonian Institution 

 lias, through the action of influences beyond the control of its manage- 

 ment , in fact by the terms of the act of Congress which authorizes its 



