35 
and I beg him to understand that I am making it for him. I 
am sure no one within these walls can have any other than 
one feeling, in view of the completion of the building within 
whose precincts we are gathered this afternoon. President Low, 
ladies and gentlemen, has said that there are two sides to the 
work of a Museum of Natural History — two aspects — and I could 
not help thinking as I came here this afternoon that one of the 
two which was gratified by one sense of taste was the new outside 
which has been so felicitously completed. Certainly it is an indi- 
cation of progress that here, in connection with the earlier con- 
struction of buildings, so much, we are sure, of that New York 
of which we are all proud, has been thus far completed. I 
wouldn't misrepresent my friend, the ex-Mayor, but I thought 
perhaps there was a tone of that fine self-assertion in the remarks 
which he has just made to you which belongs to New York, in 
view especially of the recent triumph of Chicago. 
A young theological student writing to me from the far west 
the other day, having been to see the buildings which have been 
erected in Chicago for the Columbian Exhibition, himself a 
westerner, described the situation as it struck him, in a phrase char- 
acteristically western, when he said : " My Dear Bishop. — Believe 
me if I tell you, after having seen these magnificent buildings, 
that Chicago beats her friend." A very large task, some of us 
who know Chicago, to have been accomplished; and yet when 
you remember, ladies and gentlemen, the buildings which have 
been erected of singular beauty, of remarkable felicity of arrange- 
ment, everyone of them, I believe, designed by an architect from 
New York, and decorated by a decorator from New York, that 
every one of those buildings is destined, if left to itself, to tumble 
down in ten years — it is a very interesting and suggestive contrast 
of the remarkable result which has been achieved here within 
these walls and on this site, as illustrating a wholly different end. 
Believe me, we have a place for the instruction which is epheme- 
ral, but we have a much more large and hungry place for the 
instruction which is permanent. This building has come to stay, 
and it stands, if I understand it aright, ladies and gentlemen, for 
ideas which are preeminently a part of the highest civilization in 
what we believe to be the most beautiful country in the world. 
