40 



FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 



I trust you will excuse me if this paper goes a little haltingly, and 

 if I have used in it some things that I may have said before. 



The less one does, the less one wishes to do, and when I go away 

 on a vacation, I am only too glad, for the time being, to leave all thought 

 of museums and their work behind. 



The Poverty of the Large Museum 



Our friends in the smaller museums are often surprised that large 

 institutions do not respond more quickly or more frequently to some of 

 the calls made upon them: knowing how much a small museum may 

 and does accomplish with very limited means, they feel that to the great 

 institution all things should be possible. 



Why, for example, can not a promised gift or exchange of bird skins 

 be made promptly? 



There are known to be perhaps 200,000 skins in the collection and 

 surely some are available. But — the curator is engaged in the pre- 

 liminary study of 1,000 skins just received, and the assistants are en- 

 gaged in cataloging and arranging still other thousands. The skins 

 presumably available for exchange may comprise series not merely from 

 one locality casting light on problems of individual variation, but they 

 may prove to cover a wide range of territory and be valuable for the 

 study of geographic variation — in either case none can be spared, at 

 least for the time being. 



The case is often like that of the man well on the road to intoxica- 

 tion, — one may have too much but not enough. This recalls Mrs. 

 Witmer Stone's definition of " a series " : "one more specimen than any 

 one has." 



Take again the matter of casts or reproductions. It seems strange 

 to a curator of a small museum that the great sister institution can not 

 immediately send him a cast he needs very badly. But — the moulder in 

 the large museum is wanted for work in half a dozen departments, each 

 of which is positive that its own particular need is the greatest and most 

 pressing in the museum, and so it is some time before the cast can be 

 made. The artist is as much in demand as the moulder and his services 

 are bespoke for work long planned. So are the services of other artisans 

 who may be concerned in the making of a given piece, glass-blower, 

 blacksmith, carpenter, each is continually and continuously wanted by 

 somebody. So it has come about that museums are beginning to turn 

 work of this kind over to outside parties, having come to the con- 



