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I am led back in my thought to a great antiquity by this word 
"museum." In the form in which we have it, it tells of those 
conquests of imperial Rome, whereby she subjugated all the world, 
and in the great reach of her conquering arms finally brought 
under her dominion Greece, the mother of letters and of art. 
The Greeks had this thing, and they called it mouseon, a temple 
of the Muses. The Romans took the thing and changed the 
word into the form in which we have it, and so we are celebrating 
to-day, in the opening of this new building for the Museum of 
Natural History, the modern form of an idea that has occupied 
the attention of mankind as something worth their while for many 
centuries. 
A museum has two sides to it, what one may call the popular 
side and the scholarly side. On its popular side it may serve, I 
think, a two-fold purpose. The Spaniards have a proverb of a 
narrow-minded man that may have originated in the days of 
Columbus, for aught I know ; they say of such an one that he has 
never been seasick ; that is, he has never travelled ; he has not 
had his eyes opened by seeing different nations, by witnessing 
their customs, by realizing that no nation has all the wit and 
wisdom of the world, nor all the goodness of it either. A city 
like New York, to which so many different nationalities come, is 
a cosmopolitan city because they come here, but there is some- 
thing in different countries besides the people that inhabit them, 
and this Museum is one of the agencies that lays before the people 
of New York that which is to be seen in other lands, under other 
skies. 
I recollect hearing an anecdote of a man living in southeastern 
Kentucky, upon one of the mountains there, who had never left 
his native hillside till he became a man fifty or sixty years of age. 
Some momentous event in his history compelled him then to make 
a journey twenty miles distant. He returned to his home and 
addressed his son somewhat in this way : "Sonny, if the world is 
as large in every direction as it is the way I went, I tell you it is 
a whopper." 
I think, therefore, a museum is an enlarging influence, a dis- 
tinctly enlarging influence, in the midst of a great population like 
this, only a small portion of whom, even under modern condi- 
