Plans for Future Developtnent 31 



school with splendid equipment, to which come classes from the ele- 

 mentary schools of the vicinity for lectures given by members of the 

 Museum staff. 



The dissolution of the New York street car system and the in- 

 creasing cost of fares make it more difficult than ever to bring the 

 school children in remote districts to the Museum for lectures. It 

 has therefore become increasingly important that the local lecture 

 center idea should be extended so that a greater number of children 

 may profit by the Museum's lecture service. There should be estab- 

 lished at least ten such lecture centers. The extension of this work 

 we hope to take up immediately. 



The second line of development is greater cooperation with exist- 

 ing agencies for educational work in the city, where the Museum does 

 not take the initiative. We refer to the work of 

 cooperation ' such organizations as the School Nature League, 

 with other initiated and carried on under the inspired leader- 

 agencies ghip f j\j rs John I. Northrop. This organization 



with its nature rooms in the schools is doing a 

 great service in bringing to the children a realization of nature and 

 what nature means. This is a work that we wish might have been 

 inaugurated by The American Museum of Natural History, because 

 of our pride in the Museum. The work is being well done, however, 

 and the American Museum is glad to lend its influence and resources 

 of material to the furthering of this movement. In a similar manner 

 the Museum is ready to assist in the larger program for visual in- 

 struction being developed by Director Crandall of the Bureau of 

 Visual Instruction. Again this is a case where the Museum strongly 

 desires to get behind and help push, its institutional spirit being satis- 

 fied merely in a furtherance of good work. 



The third plan of development is the new feature of the Museum's 

 educational program and is perhaps the most fundamental and im- 

 portant of all plans so far attempted. It consists 

 extension to m carrying a knowledge of the Museum's re- 

 schools G for soul *ces to the student teachers in the training 

 teachers schools. There are three of these schools in 



Greater New York (exclusive of Hunter College) 

 under the direction of the Board of Education, for the development 

 of teachers. In these a thousand to fifteen hundred young women are 

 undergoing intensive training which will fit them to be teachers. 



The idea of the Museum especially cooperating with the training 

 schools was originally suggested by Dr. Gustave Straubenmiiller, 

 Associate Superintendent in charge of these schools, and recently the 

 Museum has given a series of lectures at the New York Training 



