HYATT: REPORT OF THE CURATOR. 
277 
science there can be no reasonable doubt. The first duty of a 
museum is to secure the safety of its collections and put them in 
order, but this is only the first step, a beginning for further work, 
not an end in itself. 
This department also has not an adequate exhibition of the mor¬ 
phology of the great organic subkingdom that it represents, and we 
ought to perfect this exhibition as well as conduct the department 
with due attention to the needs of science and the public. 
One of the most important, if not the most important part of the 
Museum consists of a series of collections which have been syste¬ 
matically accumulated for the purpose of illustrating the natural 
history of New England. These are at present located in the 
respective departments in which they have been gathered, the New 
England minerals in the mineral room, the rocks in the geological 
room, and so on. As they are now, they interfere to a consid¬ 
erable extent with the arrangement and make it impracticable to 
write any general guide for the whole Museum that would be of 
use to visitors, or satisfactory to its author. If, on the contrary, 
they were assembled in a consecutive series, they would show the 
history of the natural features and natural products of New England 
and would afford a chance for exhibiting the results of investigations 
upon the geology, mineralogy, botany, and zoology of New England 
that would be practically unlimited and capable of any modification 
or expansion that the future might demand. In other words, it 
would be the beginning of a museum within our own, correlated 
in its arrangement but entirely independent and devoted to a 
purpose so distinct, that it might, if necessary, be taken out bodily 
in the future and put into a building of its own, and yet leave the 
rest of the museum entire as a consistent educational and general 
systematic exposition of the organic kingdom. If, during the coming 
visit of the American association for the advancement of science 
this summer, we could throw open such a series of collections that 
would enable them to pass in review the geology of the Boston 
Basin and of New England and the relations of the rocks to the 
configuration of the surface, and the minerals, the plants, and the 
animals of this same region, it would interest and instruct them 
more than any other exposition of natural objects possibly could. 
This scheme of rearrangement in the Museum is entirely prac¬ 
ticable, but like all other improvements demands corresponding 
expenditures, and the Society has not the means for such purposes. 
