Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/220

216 and the gallery of plaster casts for art-students. Frequently, too, the museum of a local society is intended solely to preserve natural or artificial objects for reference by the collectors and amateurs who constitute its members.

Scarcely any museum can nowadays be regarded as the strict preserve of investigators. In fact, the total number of museums whose main function it is to amass vast collections for the advancement of knowledge can never be very great; indeed, the smaller the better. The scattering of material and of the necessary literary apparatus through thousands of towns would not conduce to either economy or efficiency. Concentration permits of comparison, better equipment, a larger and more highly trained staff, while it necessitates the intercourse of fellow-workers and leads to interchange of ideas. Such a museum should be a great organization for research, with laboratories, libraries, studios and publications, with a staff of investigators, preparators, artists, photographers, copyists and the usual servants. I have not mentioned curators, believing any attempt to separate them from investigators to be a false economy.

Museums entirely devoted to the inspiration of the lay public are hard to find. But they exist in theory if not in practice; and theorectically too the encouragement of art and science among the populace is the main reason for the establishment of most museums, especially the municipal.

Now, where museums come to grief is in attempting to sit on these three stools, or rather through not distinguishing clearly enough that the stools are three and that they are of very different nature.

A small museum with small means should make the choice of not more than two out of the three; and the function to be dropped should, in my opinion, be investigation. Not that the curators of small museums should be warned off the field of original work; but the museum should neither amass nor preserve specimens of interest chiefly to specialists. From the two remaining functions, instruction and inspiration, it should select the one more appropriate to the conditions of its existence and spend its energies on that.

Many a large museum, on the other hand, is able to undertake all three functions, and if it be supported out of public funds, it is its duty so to do. It is not enough to provide admirably for two classes of visitors, and to suppose that the same provision will satisfy the third class. On the contrary, the more thoroughly the wants of any two classes are supplied, the more will the third class be left out in the cold.

Take the case of a large museum of any subject. Usually an attempt is made to combine all three functions in one series of rooms and cases. For the sake of the collectors and amateurs, a large number of objects is exhibited; and this perplexes the public. For the