332 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters. 
ties and sixties: “For purposes of instruction and for the pop¬ 
ular exhibition of animal life, Professor Agassiz departed from 
the usual custom of one great systematic series with very many 
specimens crowded together, and established the principle of 
the selection of a small number of characteristic forms, associat¬ 
ing recent species and their skeleton in juxtaposition with fossil 
forms.” 3 
In objection it may be urged that such a selection necessi¬ 
tates the imposition upon the public of th© ideas of the curator 
rather than that the exhibits reflect as closely as possible condi¬ 
tions as they are found in nature; and as no curator is omnis¬ 
cient even in his special department he is liable to err by paint¬ 
ing in his exhibit a false picture of natural conditions. That 
conditions in nature as they are found to-day may very imper¬ 
fectly or even falsely depict conditions as they existed in the 
past must be evident to all who reflect on the perishability of 
many objects. “The imperfections of the geological record” 
has become a stereotyped phrase and not infrequently has it 
been known long before a single fragment has been wrested 
from the rocks that a certain type of animal must have existed, 
and in large numbers. Were we to judge the Indians of the 
past only by their collected remains we would suppose that their 
use of wood and bone was very slight because, particularly for 
the older cultures, such remains are exceedingly rarely found. 
In cases like these were it possible to make an exhibition liter¬ 
ally showing the facts as they are found, it would very wrongly 
represent conditions as they formerly existed; and in an ulti¬ 
mate analysis this restoration of a biota or of a civilization is 
the object of such exhibits in museums of the character under 
consideration. In museums whose contents are to be used by 
scholars for study, any interpretations of this sort are uncalled 
for and had better be omitted, for in them the student is ex¬ 
pected to elaborate his own theory. A research museum is to 
be used for educational purposes but is not, like a. public mu¬ 
seum educational; it is passive, not active. However, it is well 
to recollect that inasmuch as a museum can contain but a sel¬ 
ected few of the specimens obtainable in the field it must after 
