FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 



39 



many of our smaller colleges. There are many good reasons for this 

 neglect aside from the all-important one of the lack of the mu- 

 seum sense. The teacher has work that must be done, and his interest 

 in the collection is necessarily a secondary matter. And then schools 

 and colleges are closed at least one-fifth of the year and have neither the 

 means nor the inclination to care for their little museums during this 

 time, while the library is ever open. 



The union of museum and library would afford good scope for the 

 utilization of two important factors in founding and starting a museum, 

 the private collector and loan collections. And while no one is more 

 consistently opposed than myself to the acceptance of loans by a large 

 museum, no one more fully recognizes their value and importance in the 

 beginning of things. It is the collector who usually fails to realize the 

 limitations of loans, and feels hurt when his collection is declined. These 

 collections may be looked upon as the scaffolding and false work for the 

 erection of some great bridge or other piece of engineering. They are all 

 essential at the outset— the work could not be done without them, and 

 yet when the structure has been completed, the elaborate and costly 

 things are stripped away. 



And equally as I am opposed to mixed museums on a large scale, to 

 gatherings of heterogeneous material that, like a tangle of ropes, presents 

 a dozen loose ends that lack continuity and end in a snarl, I am in favor 

 of mixed collections on a small scale, because they present so many points 

 of interest. 



The best museum man is not he who does nothing because the 

 material is not available to fit into some carefully thought-out plan, but 

 he who can take whatever may be at hand and weave it into some in- 

 structive if not thoroughly harmonious whole. 



In every small town there are things of interest, things which are 

 much more valuable when combined than when seen as isolated, in- 

 dividual units. A cup and saucer here, a plate there, when brought 

 together make an instructive and interesting display, none the less 

 valuable because they are few in number. For the motto of the modern, 

 up-to-date museum is non multa sed multum, not a vast assemblage of 

 things but a selected assemblage well displayed and carefully labeled, 

 and so the small collection in a small town is proportionately just as 

 effective as the large museum in a great city. 



It is not so much the material as the manner in which it is handled, 

 and I know of at least one provincial museum full of interesting things 

 that presents the air of an old-time attic on a large scale. The speci- 

 mens are there— the possibilities great, but the curator is lacking. 



