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endeavor to provide all the means possible to avert evils similar to 
those with which this city has been afflicted, and which tend to afflict 
it in a still greater degree in the future. 
Among these means I would of course place in the first rank a 
liberal support of the Christian minister and the Christian missionary, 
but the labors of these may be greatly aided by whatever tends to 
neutralize the intensified selfishness engendered by the struggle in a 
large city for supremacy, and the unfavorable effort of extreme exclu 
sion from intercourse with nature, and above all, the ready indulgence 
of degrading passions. This is especially the province of museums of 
art and nature. They not only ofler a substitute for immoral gratifi- 
cations by supplying intellectnal pleasures, but may also be rendered 
sources of moral and even religious instruction. The establishment, 
the begiuniug of which we are about to inaugurate is, in accordance 
with the views we have presented, worthy of the enterprise and intel- 
ligence of those who conceived and who have thus far developed it. 
It is to be a temple of nature in which the productions of the inorgamc 
and organic world, together with the remnants of the past ages of the 
human family are to be collected, classified, and properly exhibited. 
It is to be rendered an attractive exhibition which shall arrest the 
attention of the most unobserving of those who, having been confined 
all their lives to the city, have come to consider edifices of brick and 
of stone as the most prominent objects of the physical world. 
We have learned from the interesting address of the President of 
the Museum, that already large collections of specimens in natural his- 
tory and ethnology have been secured. But such a collection, however 
well arranged and interestingly displayed, is still wanting in an essen- 
tial element of higher usefulness. I allude to the spiritual part of its 
constitution, to the controUing, intellectual, and moral soul which shall 
direct its operations and instruct the multitudes who may flock to the 
e.xhibition for amuaen.er.t or the gratification of mere curiosity, in a 
craving for novelties. How incomparably greater would the import- 
ance of this museum be were there connected with it a professor, who 
at stated periods of the year would give courses of free lectures on the 
objects which it contains, who would expound the laws of the 
pDenomena of nature, who would point out the operations of that 
mysterious principle caUed life, who would discourse upon the changes 
the world has undergone during geological periods, and who wouiu 
