RELATION TO COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE. 3")9 



interests of all Scotland in view, the whole of our public bodies have 

 come forward to encourage the industrial museums. 



The Industrial Museum, like the College, the Court of Session, or 

 the House of Commons, is at once a walled-in space, and an embodied 

 idea or cluster of ideas. The walled-in space takes its character from 

 the idea which it embodies, and that idea is fourfold. It includes the 

 conception of — 



1. An ample exhibitional gallery, where the raw or workable and 

 other materials of industrial ait, the tools and machines employed to 

 modify these, and the finished products resulting from their modification, 

 shall be displayed. 



2. A laboratory and workshop, where the qualities of industrial 

 materials and products, and the effectiveness ot industrial apparatus and 

 machines, may be investi gated. 



3. A library, where the special literature of industrial art .may be 

 consulted. 



4. Systematic Lectures on the contents of the galleries, the investi- 

 gations of the laboratory and workshop, and the records of the library, 

 as illustrating the nature of Technology or industrial science. 



Let me suppose the industrial museum of the future already existent 

 and realising to the full the idea just referred to. 



When that museum shall be erected, I will ask its architect to sculp- 

 ture on its front an emblematical device, namely, a circle, to imply that 

 the museum represents the industry of the whole world ; within th.3 

 circle an equilateral triangle, the respective sides of which shall denote 

 the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms, from which industrial art 

 gathers its materials ; within the triangle an open hand, as the symbol 

 of the transforming forces which change those materials ; and in the 

 palm of that hand an eye, selecting the materials which shall be trans- 

 formed. Gazing through that eye, let us see what the industrial museum 

 can do for commercial enterprise. 



L The commerce of the world deals, in the first place, very largely 

 with mineral, vegetable, and animal substances, as related to industrial 

 art, in three ways. 1. Many of them we style raw materials. The term 

 is a very expressive one, as implying that they need to be cooked, and 

 that they admit of being cooked. Originally applied to food, the mean- 

 ing is not felt to be forced as used in relation to coal, to metallic ores, 

 to sugar, to skins, or to other bodies, which can be changed, especially 

 by chemical processes, from useless into useful substances. 2. "Whilst* 

 however, we are all willing to regard coal as a raw material from which 

 gas and naphtha are prepared, and skins as a raw material from which 

 glue is elaborated, we should scarcely call marble the raw material of a 

 statue, or linen the raw material of paper. The term genetic I feel to be 

 too pedantic for general use, and the equivalent word parent is too vague. 

 Let us say workable material, and we can include in a second division all 

 those substances, such as wood, stone, gutta percha, which ore conver. 



