36 
I confess I have heard since I came within these walls one assur- 
ance in regard to its future use which has filled me with profound 
satisfaction. I refer to the close of my good friend's address. 
I have never met him, I think, on a public occasion, except it was 
in relation to some building that he himself had reared, like the 
lodging house, where I think we last met on the same platform, 
or here in this completed work with which he has so much to do. 
I thought, as I say, as I entered the room, of a few of the works 
with which he is connected ; and my friend, the President of 
Columbia College took up the same thing. I believe that one of 
the great uses of this Museum of Natural History is not alone to 
gather those remarkable collections which have been rehearsed 
here, but also to illustrate, and if I may use the word, to transform 
them into living out of dead things by the voice of the living 
teacher. Believe rne, after all, ladies and gentlemen, that office 
is the mightiest power in the world. What we want is the nurture 
of the power of process and accurate observation. We get that 
in any museum, whether it be a museum of art, or of natural 
history, or work of archaeology, but we get it most of all and best 
of all when we get it in connection with the electric flash of some 
educated and subtle mind that takes the specimen, whatever it 
might be, and holding it up before the people's eye makes it to 
live, because there throbs behind the specimen the living and 
cultured intellect. 
My friend, Charles Waldstein, an American and a New Yorker 
of whom we are justly proud, is to-day the head of the great 
University in Chemistry, and a Professor in the School of Arch- 
aeology in Athens ; went there, as I am told, a number of years 
ago, when a number of his confreres had dug up in Athens a 
fragment of stone over which they had been for weeks and weeks 
puzzling, asking " What was it ?" "Where did it come from ?" 
" To what did it belong?" Then it was Waldstein, turning the 
stone over and over again in his hand, held it up and said : " Why, 
it is a bit of the frieze of the Pantheon." There it was that you 
have the marriage of a fine intellect and highest culture with what 
is written in stone, or any work of nature. Believe me, as a New 
Yorker, I am profoundly proud and thankful for the men who 
have reared up for themselves remembrances ; who have enriched 
