Ward—Modern Exhibitional Tendencies of Museums. 333 
all reflect the ideas of the collectors and curators as to which 
objects are worthy of preservation, which are pertinent to some 
investigation; in other words the specimens are almost without 
exception collected and selected with some theories as to their 
desirability over many others which are rejected, and therefore 
no arrangement of them could very well reflect conditions as 
they occur in nature. A collection made by an uneducated, in¬ 
discriminate gatherer of everything movable would probably 
most nearly meet this impracticable ideal. We can perhaps 
show an Indian grave, the immediate setting of a birds’ nest or 
the layout of a fossil skeleton as it occurred in nature, but we 
can not hope to show the archeology of even one county of a 
state in all its possible relationships or the true avian ecology 
of a single township in the largest museum building ever con¬ 
structed. Such studies, to be of value, must be made in the 
field. The museum can not supplant nature as a primal source 
of information, and while it probably should attempt to illus¬ 
trate the manner of occurrence of many things, yet after all 
such exhibits must be for pedagogical convenience or popular 
education, and not for research, and consequently are probably 
oft’ times improved by being made schematic in character. 
The elder Agassiz was wont to give his students a few 
scales of a fish which they studied for days in solitude and with¬ 
out books until they were able to report understanding!}^ to the 
master. This method is not generally pursued today, albeit that 
Agassiz’s students were the scientific leaders and teachers of the 
last generation. His methods developed naturalists, but his 
students were those having special predilections for the subject 
and voluntarily placing themselves in his hands as students. 
While museums for the public may be and undoubtedly are 
aids in the development of budding naturalists, yet the small 
number of these is a negligible quantity and as a general state¬ 
ment, it may be said that the making of naturalists is not the 
aim of such museums, but that it is rather to ameliorate the ig¬ 
norance of the general public in a manner that will afford it 
thoughtful pleasure both in the museum and in its subsequent 
contact with nature. We doubt that this can be done by the ex- 
