Museum specimen

“ The wholesale exhibition of one class of objects leads to two things: a false impression on the part of the public as to the importance of that particular thing in the daily life of the people of ancient times, and a fatigue of mind and eye which must be avoided if the public is to benefit from the collection. To the great mass of museum visitors the exact position of a handle on a cup or the precise number of geometrical figures used in a design are of no possible interest. ”

“ Lately the ruling spirits of the Natural History Museum, on the principle, probably, that "all is Fish that comes to their net," have commenced a rival Collection of Antiquities, which contains indeed some valuable and interesting specimens, but these are so jammed together that they cannot be seen or studied to advantage, while every canon of good taste is violated by the incongruity of their surroundings. ”

“ All valuable collections are kept away from the light, which deteriorates them. In the British Museum but few specimens are shown to the general public, and even the cases containing these are covered with a square of American cloth, which the public are asked to replace after looking at them. ”

“ By and by, when the whirligig of time has brought on another revenge, the museum itself becomes a dust-heap, and remains so till after long ages it is rediscovered, and valued as belonging to a neo-rubbish age—containing, perhaps, traces of a still older paleo-rubbish civilization. ”

“ In planning, therefore, the division of space in a museum, the committee should always arrange for exhibits of interest to the local industries. In addition there must, of course, be a collection for cultural purposes, which should mean material covering the history of art in all periods and all countries. A collection of reproductions is of inestimable value in the teaching of the history of art. Few museums can hope to possess fine examples of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance sculpture. ”

“ As I have already pointed out, there is probably no museum in the world in which so small a proportion of the objects worthy of exhibition is visible to the public, or in which the objects are crowded together so closely. It is now more true than ever that if another museum building as large as the present one were provided, it could be at once filled with specimens already on hand." We feel no doubt that our American cousins will be equal to the occasion. ”

“ It is a very good collection of almost everything that Nature has made,—or exquisite copies of what she has made,—stones, shells, vegetables, insects, fishes, animals, man; the greatest wonders of the museum being some models in wax of all parts of the human frame. ”

“ In these various ways museums are helped, and within the past few years, or since the Museums Association was established in 1890, the organization, scientific value and equipment of museums have improved in a very marked degree. No doubt in some localities can still be seen the old-fashioned hotch-potch collection of miscellaneous lumber styled a museum, wherein a stuffed walrus jostles a suit of armour, and local fossils and meteorites are beautifully mixed up with birds’ eggs, flint implements and coins. ”

“ It is never under any circumstances, however, justifiable to treat an object of art and one worthy of a place in a museum as though it were a part of the decoration of the museum. It may by its nature be a decoration to the room, but it must be so arranged that for light and for space and for general effect it is shown to its best advantage. To cut a piece of sculpture, a painting or a tapestry, as a layman might do, to make it fit a given spot in a museum is to commit a crime. ”

“ That frail structure, crowded from garret to cellar with seeming rubbish, with boxes, cases, barrels, casks still unpacked and piled one above the other, held for him the treasure out of which he would give form and substance to the dream of his boyhood and the maturer purpose of his manhood. The hope of creating a great museum intelligently related in all its parts, reflecting nature, and illustrating the history of the animal kingdom in the past and the present, had always tempted his imagination. ”

“ If they are tolerably old they are often touching; but they must have a relative antiquity, for I confess I can do nothing with works of art of which the badness is of recent origin. The cool, still, empty chambers in which indifferent collections are apt to be preserved, the red brick tiles, the diffused light, the musty odour, the mementos around you of dead fashions, the snuffy custodian in a black skull-cap, who pulls aside a faded curtain to show you the lustreless gem of the museum—these things have a mild historical quality, and the sallow canvases after all illustrate something. ”

“ A collection of reproductions in plaster to supplement original material is desirable. To simply store such a collection as is done in many European museums is a waste of material. Among the visitors to our museums, there are very few who are studying the history of sculpture so profoundly that a crowded or careless arrangement which would be intelligible to a specialist is of any interest. On the contrary, the purpose of a cast collection is to stimulate enthusiasm in the study of art among all visitors. ”

“ No other qualities can possibly atone for defects of lighting in a museum. No building with a bad light can be called properly a museum; it may be an architect’s triumph, a civic ornament, a costly patchwork, a marvel of folly, but a museum it is not, if it is unfit for the first requirements of a collection. ”

“ There has been a very serious discussion of the effect of light upon collections and, while the art museum is, in this respect, less subject to harm than the scientific museum, there are yet certain groups of material that do suffer from continual exposure, and these should be protected by dark curtains or some other device, and never subjected to direct sunlight. In these classes are miniatures, water colors, textiles, embroideries, colored prints and Oriental paintings. ”

“ THOUGH the natural-history portion of the Marshlands Museum grew so rapidly that it threatened to overflow the cabinet, there were very few antiquities in the collection, a Roman lamp, an Egyptian scarab, a few old coins, and a Georgian snuff-box making up the whole of the scanty store.
"I wish we could get a few really ancient things," said Cathy one day, as she dusted and tidied the shelves. "Arrow-heads, I mean, and spindle-whorls, and bronze brooches, and all those delightful finds you hear of people digging up out of barrows. ”

“ On the contrary, as a repository for stray objects, a museum is not to be expected to have a complete series of original antiquities in any class, nor is it the business of the curator to attempt to fill up the gaps without thought of the consequences. ”

“ Isolated objects are of little value; a collector may accumulate a number of amusing and elegant specimens, but it is only by combination, concentration, and comparison, that an entertaining collection can be converted into an instructive museum, and Archaeology erected into a science. ”

“ In the National Museum there is a judicious admixture of the past and present, and still more, happily blending with these, are not only the wonders of the vegetable and floral kingdom, but of those geological, zoological, and ethnological marvels which it is the privilege of this age to have brought to light and classified. ”

“ PLANS FOR AN ARCHÆOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION There are something like three hundred museums or institutions in the United States that contain archæological collections. These exhibits range from more than a million objects, as in the case of the Smithsonian Institution, or Field Museum of Chicago, or the American Museum of Natural History, to private collections of one to ten thousand specimens each. I have roughly estimated the number of prehistoric artifacts available for study, or those of aboriginal manufacture that show little influence of European culture, at about eight million objects. ”

“ The public galleries of a museum, whether of natural history, antiquities or art, should not contain the bulk of the collection, but only special things, carefully selected, and equally carefully placed in case or on wall, with artistic judgment as to space-bordering and colour of background, and with scientific perfection of illumination, so as to produce the "just" impression on the leisurely visitor. ”

“ Let us dream that we open wide all the doors and windows of our museum and stand in the midst and clap our hands, and command the genii and gnomes to bring us the treasures hidden in rock, sand, and sea, in lake and river and peat moss and earth beds.
They come! They come! They fly through the air, gnomes, pixies, afrites, fairies, genii, and they fill every shelf and case of our museum with fossil forms and pictured rocks and sands, and give us examples of every animal and vegetable that lived so long ago. How rich and happy now are we! ”

“ Happy and absorbed, they sat cross-legged on the floor, taking out bundle after bundle. Outside of a museum they had never seen such shells: they were shaped like fans, lockets, towers, pin wheels, hearts, trumpets. ”

“ In the museum are portions of the skulls of men and of oxen, the antlers of red deer, oyster shells, knives, spear-heads, arrow-heads, bits of locks with keys, and excellent horseshoes, not to speak of such things as bronze spurs, spoons, part of a Roman weighing-machine, and a splendid pair of compasses. ”

“ I have often thought that, if some lethal vapor of highly preservative properties—such as formaldehyde, for instance—could be shed into the atmosphere of this apartment, the entire and complete collection of books and book-worms would be well worth preserving, for the enlightenment of posterity, as a sort of anthropological appendix to the main collection of the Museum. For, surely, nowhere else in the world are so many strange and abnormal human beings gathered together in one place. ”

“ The story of human life is revealed in other records, if not in the sepulchral strata of the earth's crust. In this very Museum, which the visitor now treads—in these cases of fossil bones which in themselves are common material enough, the lordly intellect that has traced their deep significance, proves that, of all animal types, man is the highest and the strongest—removed from the most powerful mammoth and megatherium—the bones of which he has re-fixed, that they may, as stones, tell the story of their wonderful characters when alive. ”

“ One of perhaps the most deeply interesting departments of your great British Museum—the wonder of the world—is that noble gallery, consisting of a suite of rooms, opening in line, the one beyond the other, which forms its rich storehouse of organic remains. You must of coarse remember the order in which the organisms of that gallery are ranged. The visitor is first ushered into a spacious room devoted to fossil plants, chiefly of the Coal Measures. ”

“ There is no class of material so often poorly exhibited in museums, nor so capable of arousing enthusiasm if properly shown, as that which is the result of excavations. The most serious mistake, and the one most often committed, is in placing before the public quantities of specimens of a similar character. ”

“ One may well dream in this zoological museum, amid the staring glass-eyed skins of an inferior brotherhood—of the long, long time ago when the fossils, which are now scattered here and there, to assure us of their former vitality, moved about the world, before they were stricken with universal death, and buried by nature, deep in her teeming bosom, to flourish presently in the veins of plants—the plants to die again, and be dug, long ages after, from our deep coal-fields. ”

“ Secondly. The museum is to manifest to these simple persons the beauty and life of all things and creatures in their perfectness. Not their modes of corruption, disease, or death. Not even, always, their genesis, in the more or less blundering beginnings of it; not even their modes of nourishment, if destructive; you must not stuff a blackbird pulling up a worm, nor exhibit in a glass case a crocodile crunching a baby. ”

“ A new world of commerce and machinery, having slain and forgotten a past race of artist craftsmen, makes clumsy atonement by sweeping together the fragments of their work and calling the collection a museum. From the four corners of the earth these relics have been gathered. Our hungry minds are bidden to make choice according to fancy, for here is variety of food! ”

“ Any one who has worked in a museum or has excavated on fifth-century sites knows that besides the selected specimens exhibited in museum cases there are a large number of inferior examples, hastily decorated, which could hardly have been displayed as ornaments, but which are open to the same objections raised against the vases of better workmanship. ”

“ The museum, named after Charles Crozatier, a native sculptor and metal-worker to whose munificence it principally owes its existence, contains antiquities, engravings, a collection of lace, and ethnographical and natural history collections. ”

“ Oh, the delights of that museum! A real museum all to yourself, where there is no horrid attendant behind you to tell you not to touch, but where every piece is actually put into your hands and you are allowed to turn it over, and look at every one of its sides, just as you please. I shall never forget the feeling of delicious horror that crept over me when first I absolutely touched one of the mummies with my hand. Mr. Tankerville was more than kind. He answered every one of my schoolboy questions with cheerful patience, explained everything, showed everything. ”