Ward—Modern Exhibitional Tendencies of Museums. 329 
the Name changed; and the Officers may turn away any one 
that shall presume to get Admittance under a fictions Name or 
Character.” 
These regulations, you will recollect, were enforced in restric¬ 
tion of the use of the nation’s museum by the citizens thereof. 
There has been since then a progressive liberalizing of these mat¬ 
ters, but I believe that it remained to very recent times to give 
the fullest practicable use of museulm exhibits free to the public. 
In fact, to the best of my knowledge, the Public Museum of the 
City of Milwaukee was the first institution of this nature to 
throw open its doors for the free admission of the public on 
every day of the year, a regulation to that effect having been 
adopted and put into force in December 1905. 
Only nineteen years ago an eminent naturalist, a curator in 
one of the largest museums in the world, replied to my question 
whether certain restrictions of exhibition were not rather hard 
on the public, with: “The public be damned.” Such an atti¬ 
tude has long since been abandoned by those who have at heart 
the welfare of their institutions and great pains and expense is 
lavished on those parts of museums designed for the especial 
use of the dear public and they are admitted at all reasonable 
times with the least possible restrictions. In that former period 
of museum evolution it was but natural that the ordinary visi¬ 
tor should be looked upon as a necessary evil, a person who un¬ 
fortunately had to be admitted because he helped to pay the mu¬ 
seum’s running expense; but it would have been too much to- 
expect that he should be particularly considered in the selection 
and labeling of the specimens placed on exhibition; and as such 
a short time has elapsed since these days it is hardly to be ex¬ 
pected that a very general concordance of opinion would be 
reached as to just what it is best to do for the public. 
During the past year some of these questions have been dis¬ 
cussed in “Science” 1 and at the meeting of the American 
Association of Museums held in Pittsburg, June 4-6, 1907, a 
symposium on “The Evolution and Aims of Museums of Art 
and Science” was held 2 which made apparent a fact that I 
had previously called attention to in “Science,”i. e., that there 
