Ward—Modern Exhibitional Tendencies of Museums. 331 
assisted by descriptive labels, appreciate the collections. Pas¬ 
sing by this factor and considering only the adults, let us try 
to reach some idea of the proportion of those visiting an Ameri¬ 
can museum who by training have some particular aptitude for 
deriving information therefrom. “American Men of Science” 
enumerates about 4,000 scientists in North America while “The 
Naturalists’ Universal Directory,” S. E. Cassino, 1905, enum¬ 
erates for the United States and Canada 5,408, a list that in¬ 
cludes astronomers, chemists, physicists, and others not specially 
interested in natural history. The population of this area 
taken live years previous to the appearance of this directory 
was 79,366,582 or one naturalist to each 14,675 of population. 
However, as there are many scientists not included in this list 
we must make allowance; so that if we multiply the proportion 
already obtained by ten, thus obtaining in round numbers one 
to every 1,400 or seven one hundreths of one per cent of popu¬ 
lation, we shall, I think, be making an exceedingly liberal esti¬ 
mate of the proportion of those instructed in the natural sciences 
and anthropology to the entire population and perhaps thereby 
also arrive at something near a fair estimate of the proportion 
of the people visiting an ordinary museum who are especially 
equipped to grasp its import,—to get much out of it unassisted. 
This percentage is so small,—any way that we estimate it 
we must find it small—that it is almost a negligible quantity 
and we are warranted in saying that natural history museums 
for the public are for non-scientific and largely unscientific 
people. If this is true then the exhibitions should be so re¬ 
stricted as not to unduly weary by reduplication nor attempt to 
show so many kinds of things of any class that the untrained 
mind will be incapable of grasping or assimilating them; con¬ 
sequently the storage style of exhibit must be dismissed at once 
as unsuited and we may even go farther and carefully select 
for display a limited number of specimens from the undupli¬ 
cated series, reserving the remainder for study. That this is 
not, in idea, a recent innovation may be seen from the following 
account of the work of Louis Agassiz in the early days of his 
development of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in the fif- 
