10 
THE INDIAN MUSEUM: 1814-1914. 
direct control of the Government of Bengal, was placed under 
the Trustees, with Mr. T. N. Mookerjee, a recognized autho¬ 
rity on Indian Art ware, as the first assistant curator in charge 
of the new department. 
The establishment of this new section at once made it 
essential for the Government seriously to grapple the question 
of additional accommodation which had been first mooted in 
1882. The result was that in 1888 the construction of the 
wing in Sudder Street was commenced, and in 1891, Mr. 
Thurston, who was then officiating for Dr. Watt, the Repor¬ 
ter on Economic Products, found himself in a position to 
remove to the new building all the collections of economic 
products, artware and ethnology. The art gallery itself 
was opened to the public in September, 1892 and the ethno¬ 
logical gallery in January, 1893, but the economic court 
was not opened to the public till several years later, viz. in 
1901, when Sir George Watt, the head of this section, retired 
and was succeeded by Mr. I. H. Burkill, now Director of the 
Botanical Gardens at Singapore. 
The Museum which, as we have seen; had originally 
started with the zoological and archaeological sections had 
thus had engrafted upon it, in course of time, the economic 
and art section, while the collections in the possession of 
the Geological Department occupied a somewhat anomalous 
and undefined position. The time bad n6w evidently arrived, 
at which it was essential to secure the proper co-ordination 
of the institution as a whole and to ensure its harmonious 
growth in the future, that a comprehensive view of its scope 
and functions should be adopted. Consequently, in 1904 Sir 
Herbert Risley, then Chairman of the Trustees, proposed 
that the Museum might be divided into five sections, namely, 
zoological and ethnological, geological, archaeological, art, 
and industrial. This distribution ultimately received the 
sanction of the Legislature in 1910. 
I have now dwelt briefly upon the history of the exten¬ 
sion of the Museum buildings rendered necessary by the 
establishment of the new economic and art section. I shall 
pass on for a moment to a somewhat different aspect of our 
