FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 



27 



However, the necessary mold and skeleton were obtained and are 

 today in the U. S. National Museum, having been, as planned, displayed 

 at St. Louis. 



The day after the skeleton of the big Blue Whale was put in place, 

 I left for Washington and began "putting my house in order" prepara- 

 tory to leaving Washington and entering upon the third stage of my 

 career. 



1904-1929 



This third period of museum work began in May, 1904, when I was 

 called to Brooklyn as Curator-in-Chief of the Museums of the Brooklyn 

 Institute of Arts and Sciences, a somewhat cumbrous title since changed 

 to Curator-in-Chief of the Brooklyn Museum. 



This offered an opportunity to put into practice the results of past 

 training and experience, though this opportunity was by no means what 

 one not acquainted with museums might suppose or expect. For while 

 the Museum was young, it was not new; it had a fairly well determined 

 policy and definitely established departments in charge of their duly 

 appointed curators. In any such institution the director is more or less 

 hampered by the policies and exhibits that he inherits; by policies in 

 which he does not believe, by exhibits — often costly — that he feels to be 

 mistakes, by departments that he thinks should never have been estab- 

 lished, and by employees — from curators to attendants — that he con- 

 siders sometimes to be inefficient, and more often unsjonpathetic or 

 interested only in their own work. But he has inherited all these, they 

 have cost much time and thought, and in many cases very considerable 

 sums of money, and unless the director is regardless of time, money, and 

 above all, the feelings of others, he will do his best with them. 



At Brooklyn, for example, the Department of Anthropology was 

 well established and in the hands of Mr. Stewart Culin, a thorough 

 student in many lines of ethnologic work and of extremely artistic taste. 

 The exhibits installed by him in the Brooklyn Museum are not only 

 accurate and educational in their presentation of facts but perhaps the 

 most attractively installed of any ethnologic exhibits, here or elsewhere. 

 My own liking would have been for a series of exhibits that should 

 give the public some idea of the physical characters, occupations and 

 customs of the inhabitants of various sections of the world. Mr. Culin's 

 plan was to concentrate on certain phases of culture with which he was 

 acquainted or in which he was particularly interested, commencing with 

 those that lay near at hand which would give immediate results in the 



