24 Report of the President 



of Curator Wissler and Doctor Herbert J. Spinden, as- 

 sisted by Mr. David Aaron, Mr. M. D. C. Crawford, Mr. 

 Stewart Culin, Mr. Max Meyer and Miss Jessie Franklin 

 Turner, and the movement had the hearty support and 

 cooperation of thirty-five manufacturing houses and experi- 

 enced designers. In the plan of the exhibition, the Museum 

 specimen was shown in proximity to the modern design 

 or costume derived from it. This initial step in pointing out 

 the possibilities of cooperation between our museum and the 

 textile industries received much favorable comment and brings 

 forward the suggestion that the extension of the Museum 

 to cover applied sciences is desirable. 



UNTRUTHFUL ARRANGEMENT OF COLLECTIONS 



With all this obvious advance, the Museum has certainly 

 come to a full stop in some branches of its educational 

 work, and in many branches it is actually going 

 Confusion backward. We are not truthfully presenting 

 Congestion the f ac ts about amphibians, reptiles, fishes, 

 birds or mammals — because of disorderly 

 arrangement. In hall after hall the arrangement is less 

 truthful and more misleading than it was twenty years ago, 

 because the collections are jumbled together out of their 

 natural order. Animals which are not in the least related 

 are placed side by side. Animals of the remote past, in fact 

 of the very dawn of life, crowd the animals of to-day and 

 yesterday. Small wonder that in the popularized science of 

 the day, which is constantly flowing from Museum sources 

 and finding its way into the newspapers all over this conti- 

 nent, dinosaurs are represented as contemporaneous with the 

 mammoth and mastodon. Small wonder that the impres- 

 sions of the superb succession of life through the ages of 

 Vertebrates — of Fishes, of Amphibians, of Reptiles, of 

 Mammals, of the Antiquity of Man — are completely con- 

 fused. It is exactly as if some Chippendale furniture and 

 Chinese peach blow vases should be placed in the center of 



