Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/466

446 of its work, it was constituted a department of the university. Its collections are now contained in halls devoted to them in the library. They comprise eight sections, each in charge of a curator, as follows: American and Prehistoric Archæology, Asian and General Ethnology, Babylonian Casts, Egyptian and Mediterranean Glyptics, Musical Instruments, and Paleontology. The American Museum occupies a spacious hall. Long rows of flat cases fill the center of the room. In these are contained a carefully arranged collection of the objects of stone, bronze, bone, and pottery which comprise the few material evidences of the presence of man on the eastern part of this continent before the arrival of European settlers. There are displayed the rude stone implements from the Trenton gravels, the discovery of which carried back the antiquities of man in America to a period hitherto undreamed of, constituting an era in the science of American archæology. There are also finished stone implements of the recent Indians, and the fragments which alone remain of the rude Indian pottery. These specimens are arranged State by State through almost the entire Union. The exhibition space is at present chiefly occupied with the Hazzard collection from the cliff dwellings of Mancos Cañon in southwestern Colorado. Here, under the wide dome of the Library building at the university, is a little colony of people and things estimated to be two thousand years old. The village was discovered by two brothers named Wetherile, in 1888, in the heart of the cañon of the Mancos River in Colorado. They bought up the village at a very low figure, and sold it to Mr. C. D. Hazzard, of Minneapolis. Mr. Hazzard showed a part of his wonderful collection at the World's Fair, and Mr. Stewart Culin, of the university, secured it for exhibition in the museum. The collection represents in an almost unbroken series the entire life of these strange people, telling in plain words more about them than we know now about the warring Indian tribes which inhabited the eastern coast of North America. This exhibition shows that in the wilds of the Rocky Mountains, where this curious colony of people were driven for refuge by the wilder tribes inhabiting the plains, there existed two thousand years ago a civilization and a culture that will bear comparison with its contemporary countries throughout the world. The Mexican antiquities consist chiefly of objects from graves, among which are a number of cinerary urns, with their original contents of calcined human bones. From Peru there is a highly important collection of pottery from the ancient sepulchres, with mummies and a number of the simple objects, such as food, weapons, and household implements, which the Peruvians were accustomed to bury with their dead. From the islands of the Pacific may be seen the weapons and pottery, the carvings of