Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 59.djvu/19

Rh purposes of display, and seven rooms which are used as laboratories and offices. Three of the exhibition halls are situated on the second floor of the building and three upon the third. Two of the laboratories are situated on either side of the lecture-hall on the first floor, and the three remaining laboratories are in the basement of the building. The floor space available for the display of the collections amounts, at the present time, to a little more than twelve thousand square feet. The floor space devoted to laboratories is five thousand square feet. The lecture-hall will comfortably accommodate about six hundred persons.

The walls of a museum are to its contents what the frame is to a picture. The generosity of the founder provided at the outset a beautiful edifice under the roof of which to assemble the collections which it was destined to contain, but he did not forget to provide for what after all is the museum itself, and has from year to year supplemented the income derived from his original gift of a million of dollars by the purchase of collections, which he has himself selected, or by placing at the disposal of the Director of the Museum funds with which to make special collections.