262 
Dr. G. Brown Goode's Paper. 
[506 
however, and we but thirteen, since our Exhibition. May 
we not hope that within a like period of time, and before 
the year 1914, the United States may have attained the 
position which England now occupies, at least in the 
respects of popular interest and substantial governmental 
support?. There are now over one hundred and fifty 
public museums in the United Kingdom, all active and 
useful. 
The museum systems of Great Britain are, it seems to 
me, much closer to the ideal which America should follow, 
than are those of either France or Germany. They are 
designed more thoughtfully to meet the needs of the 
people, and are more intimately intertwined with the policy 
of national popular education. 
Sir Henry Cole, the working founder of the “ Department 
of Science and Art,” speaking of the purpose of the 
museums under his care, said to the people of Birmingham 
in 1874: 
“ If you wish your schools of Science and Art to be effective, your health, 
the air, and your food to be wholesome, your life to be long, your manufactures 
to improve, your trade to increase, and your people to be civilized, you must 
have Museums of Science and Art, to illustf'ate the principles of life, health, 
nature, science, art and beauty. ” 
Again, in words as applicable to Americans of to-day as 
to Britons in 1874, said he: 
“ A thorough education, and a knowledge of science and art are vital to the 
nation, and to the place it holds at present in the civilized world. Science and 
art are the life-blood of successful production. All civilized nations are run- 
ning a race with us, and our national decline will date from the period when 
we go to sleep over the work of education, science, and art. What has been 
done is at the mere threshold of the work yet to be done.” 
The people’s museum should be much more than a house 
full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full 
of ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system. I 
once tried to express this thought by saying: An efficient 
educational museum may be described as a collection of 
instructive labels, each illustrated by a well selected specime^i." 
The museum, let me add, should be more than a collec- 
tion of specimens, well arranged and well labelled. Like 
