FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 



29 



my friends to see the Museum, by that time we had made appreciable 

 progress and chaos was giving way to mere confusion. 



And when seven years later I was called to New York, I left behind 

 a small but evenly balanced exhibit of the classes of vertebrates, a fine 

 beginning of a similar display of invertebrates, some groups such as the 

 guacharo birds, orioles and others as yet unsurpassed, and unique 

 exhibits illustrating evolution and the preservation of animals, among 

 them the first illustrations of Thayer's counter-shading and concealing 

 coloration shown in any museum in the United States. 



Perhaps my most keen regret was the failure to develop a botanical 

 exhibit along the lines of those carried out for zoology. The subject had 

 frequently been discussed by Mr. Morris and myself and one of the 

 objects in view in securing the services of Mr. Morris, he being an excel- 

 lent botanist, was to develop that side of the museum. One of the 

 features of the Botanical Exhibit was to have been a series of groups 

 showing interesting plants, or features of plant life, something that has 

 not yet been done. The first of these groups — adaptations of plants to 

 desert life — was planned by Mr. Morris, the studies made, material 

 collected and the group begun. After the death of Mr. Morris the plan 

 for a botanical exhibit was abandoned and a number of antelopes were 

 introduced into the Adaptations of Plants to a Desert Life. 



The Trustees failed to grasp the fact that the establishment of the 

 Brooklyn Botanic Garden did not lessen the desirability of a botanical 

 exhibit in the Museum, and that the work and exhibits of the two did 

 not conflict, that each institution could do something that it was not in 

 the power of the other to carry out. 



The next step, as I have said, was from Brooklyn to New York, to 

 the Directorship of the American Museum of Natural History in 1911, 

 and, naturally, this part of the story of my museum career must, if 

 written at all, be written later and by some one else, some one who I 

 trust can judge impartially and write unprejudicedly — though I hope 

 sympathetically of what has or has not been accomplished. 



It may appear surprising that it was not without great hesitation 

 that I left the Brooklyn Museum, but in doing so the opportunity to 

 build up an educational museum that should, so far as Natural History 

 was concerned, reflect my own views and be an evenly balanced exposi- 

 tion of plant and animal life was lost forever 1 — and such a museum does 

 not, so far as I am aware, exist either here or abroad. For Museums, 



•And vet— this mav be entirely wrong— the death of my colleague, Mr. E L Morris, and that of 

 Colonel Woodward and other sympathetic trustees, together with the arrest of budding operations, 

 completely changed the course of events. 



