618 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



suits could be secured. It is obvious that the acquisitions can be 

 more easily made through private persons who are in more imme- 

 diate intercourse with the inhabitants of the special districts, than 

 through state officers, who will be hampered by numerous re- 

 serves. It seems clear, therefore, that the best course for the im- 

 mediate present will be to excite interest in the enterprise among 

 the people themselves ; and to secure the participation of friends of 

 the scheme in the practical support of its promoters. The devel- 

 opment of the older museums has been predominantly to the ad- 

 vantage of the representative arts. Even architecture has been 

 crowded into the background after sculpture and painting. In- 

 dustrial art has been very slowly and tardily recovered from ob- 

 livion. Those highest efforts of human skill, while they arouse 

 the admiration of the observer, vitalize and elevate the under- 

 standing, excite it to imitation, and give direction to the activity 

 of whole generations. They have thus become pre-eminently the 

 criterion of civilization. 



But civilization has never anywhere come up at once. Many 

 generations have to apply their best force, through slow labor, to 

 gain artistic skill and make it at home. A kind of hereditary 

 transmission assures the continuance of progress in this field, and 

 in case of long interruption the recovery of aims and methods 

 once possessed. Not only, therefore, does the investigator, the 

 real art-expert, give his attention to the study of the history of 

 art, but the question also occurs to the simple man of the people 

 — who may have made such a great discovery, and how, in the 

 course of time, ever higher degrees of skill and understanding in 

 art are mastered. 



Two circumstances have hitherto given deep significance to 

 these questions, and extended them far over the domain of pure 

 art : First, the increasing knowledge of the efforts of savages. This 

 began with the great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth 

 centuries, but only obtained that fruitful significance in the gen- 

 eral view which is now apparent to all with the scientific expedi- 

 tions of the last century, especially with Cook's voyages and Alex- 

 ander von Humboldt's researches. Who does not know that the 

 course of civilization from its rudest beginnings to an often sur- 

 prising height, lies visible as in an open book in the savages of 

 to-day, and that the development of society, law, and religions, as 

 well as the ordering of the household and the whole theory of 

 property in household goods and ornaments, domestic animals 

 and useful plants, may be observed, now here, now there, in their 

 gradual building up ? Unhappily, the savages are disappearing 

 with fearful rapidity under contact with civilized races ; and it 

 may be considered fortunate that the increased care in the obser- 

 vation and collection of the things peculiar to these perishing sur- 



