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large city for supremacy, and the unfavorable effort of extreme exclu- 

 sion from intercourse with nature, and above all, the ready indulgence 

 of degrading passions. This is especially the province of museums of 

 art and uature. They not only offer a substitute for immoral gratifi- 

 cations by supplying intellectual pleasures, but may also be rendered 

 sources of moral and even religious instruction. The establishment, 

 the beginning of which we are about to inaugurate is, in accordance 

 with the views we have presented, worthy of the enterprise and intel- 

 ligence of those who conceived and who have thus far developed it. 

 It is to be a temple of nature in which the productions of the inorganic 

 and organic world, together with the remnants of the past ages of the 

 human family are to be collected, classified, and properly exhibited. 

 It is to be rendered an attractive exhibition which shall arrest the 

 attention of the most unobserving of those who, having been confined 

 all their lives to the city, have come to consider edifices of brick and 

 of stone as the most prominent objects of the physical world. 



We have learned from the interesting address of the President of 

 the Museum, that already large collections of specimens in natural his- 

 tory and ethnology have been secured. But such a collection, however 

 well arranged and interestingly displayed, is still wanting in an essen- 

 tial element of higher usefulness. I allude to the spiritual part of its 

 constitution, to the controlling, intellectual, and moral soul which shall 

 direct its operations and instruct the multitudes who may flock to the 

 exhibition for amusement or the gratification of mere curiosity, in a 

 craving for novelties. How incomparably greater would the import- 

 ance of this museum be were there connected with it a professor, who 

 at stated periods of the ypar would give courses of free lectures on the 

 objects which it contains, who Avould expound the laws of the 

 phenomena of nature, who Avould point out the operations of that 

 mysterious principle called life, who would discourse upon the changes , 

 the world has undergone during geological periods, and who would 

 reconstruct the history of man in primitive times from the remnants 

 of his previous existence which have been gathered in this institution. 



For example, what an effect would be produced on thousands of 

 the inhabitants of this vast city if it were announced that an Agassiz, 

 filled with enthusiastic sympathy with his subject and his audience, 

 and capable of mingling moral considerations with scientific principles, 

 of directing attention from nature to nature's God, of not only en- 

 lightening the heads, but of warming the hearts of his audience, -were 

 to give free courses of instruction. 



