The eye is used more and more, the ear less and less, and when the eye is used, the descriptive font moves away from the pictures, and the pictures are replaced by actual objects. The museum of the past must be removed, reconstructed, transformed from a bric-a-brac graveyard into a nursery of living thoughts. The true meaning of the word museum can best be assessed by allusion to the periods before its creation - when our museum is.
The public men of Rome at a later period of its history were by no means conscious of the pretensions of art. The taste for works of art was in the days of ancient civilizations generally spread throughout the Mediterranean region, and there is much reason to believe that there were prototypes of them. It is appropriate to have professional laboratories and libraries for the development of experts who will organize, regulate and explain museums.
It is true that laboratories are used to their full potential for the benefit of the institution to which they belong. One of the saddest things in this life is the realization that with the death of the older members of a community, so much precious knowledge and experience is lost to the world. I should not organize the nuisance primarily for the benefit of people in their larval or school-going phase of existence.
It concerns only the contents of the museum, as distinguished from those of the library, and makes no mention of the differences in its management. The library's treasures must be explored one by one and by one person at a time; their use requires prolonged attention and their removal from their proper place in the system of order. The old monastery in which they are placed offers a beautiful example of the interior decoration art of the Middle Ages.
Another collection of the same general character as that just described is the Soane Museum at Lyondon. The Museum of the Hohenzollerns in Berlin and the Museum .. in the city of Paris are necessarily unique. Opportunities such as the one now open to members of the Brooklyn Institute occur only once in a nation's lifetime.
England, where the government, regardless of the theory that everything should be left to private effort, has done wonderful things for everyone under the leadership of the late Prince Consort and the Prince of Wales. provincial towns, as well as London, in promoting libraries, museums, art, and industrial education. We talk about educational problems and the educational method of accommodation so often that there can be inconsistencies in the use of the term. Perhaps it would be instructive to make an overview of the main noiseums of the world and briefly state their main characteristics.
London and Paris, stands the collections in the Imperial Calnnet in .. ienna, and those of the Zoological Museums in Berlin, Leyden, Copenhagen, and Christiania.
Among the botanical museums, the most important is that in the royal gardens at Kew, near London, with its vast herbarium, containing the best collection in the world, and the special museum of economic botany, founded in 1847, both of which stand in the midst of a collection of living plants. Among the geological and mineralogical collections, the mineralogical cabinet in Vienna, arranged in imperialca.stle, is among the first. The Museum of Practical Geology in London, affiliated with the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom, was founded in 1837 to exhibit collections of research to "demonstrate the application of geology to the useful purposes of life".
It stands in the very first rank of nuiseums for general instruction, the arrangement of the exhibition halls being the most admiral. Holland has reorganized the National Ethnographic Museum (Rijks Ethnographisch Museum) in Eeyden, and there are smaller collections in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and The Hague. In Italy there is the important Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum (Museoprehistorico ed ethnografico) in Rome, as well as the collection of the Propaganda, and there are museums in Florence and Venice.
In England there is little attention paid to the subject - the Christy collection. in the British Museum is the only .specially dedicated dentalography, unless we also include the local Blackmore Museum in Salisbury. In the United States the i)riiici])al estabhshnieiits arranged on the ethnic plan are the Peal)()dy Museum of Archeology in Cambridge and the collections in the Peabody Academy of vSciences in vSalem, .. and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Ethnological collections in Washington are classified in a dual system; one of its characteristics corresponding to that of the Kuropean; in others, like the famous Pitt-Rivers collection at Oxford, arranged to .. show the evolution of culture and civilization without regard to race.
Most notable among these, perhaps, is the Musce Guimet, lately removed from Lyonsto Paris, which is intended to illustrate the history of religious ceremonies among all races of men.. of this class are some of those in Paris, such as the jMusee de Marine , which shows not only the development of the country's merchant and naval navies, but also, by means of trophies and other historical stories, the history of the nation's naval battles. , attached to the Conservatory of ]\Iitsic in the Paris Museum in Washington and in the Conservator^' of Music in Boston, and the Metroc^litan Museum in New York has recently acquired a very full collection by Mrs. J<^hn Crosby Brown , of the town.
Germain, near Paris, exhibits the history of France in the time of the Gauls and Romans. The Galileo Museum in Florence, the Shakespeare Museum in Stratford, are good examples. In consequence of this feeling, only articles of arti.stic excellence have been saved, and none have gone to destruction, which would be of the utmost importance to those who now ... study the history of human thought in the ages.
Many of the arrangements in the European art collections are designed to send cold shivers down the back of a sensibility. A friend recounting an experience in vSouth Kensington said: "I applied to a man who sells photographs of rigid structures for pictures of the main building.. of the South Ken.sington Mti.seum!".
