Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/222

218 proper store-cabinets, and especially of interchangeable drawers, our reduced and over-worked staff finds it less trouble to thrust a new acquisition into a show-case than to make room for it in the confused and crowded study-series.

It is to obviate such difficulties that I propose the further division of the exhibited series. In this way more specimens can be exhibited for the student and amateur with less trouble and expense, and in a more practical manner, as, for example, on interchangeable trays or frames, which can as needed be removed for the use of the specialist. The student will no longer be disturbed by the loud-voiced pastor or by urchins at hide-and-seek, and the elimination of crowds will permit a saving in floor and cubic space. The public galleries in their turn will be freed from students with their apparatus and from inappropriate specimens, while such objects as remain can be displayed in a more becoming manner.

It is easy enough to see where we have gone wrong. The advance towards democracy has been too rapid, the revolution too complete. We have thrown open everything to the public, to the public's bewilderment and our own undoing. The lot of a curator in a large museum is not altogether a happy one. Surrounded by the treasures that his heart longs for, he must maintain them for the use and enjoyment of others, while, Tantalus-like, he himself is unable to reach them. He consoles himself with the thought that he is a martyr for the good of humanity, and he has not seen how to shift his ever-increasing burden. The suggestions here made will, I believe, benefit the specialist, the student and the man in the street; but the argument most likely to secure their adoption is that they will also benefit the curator. If consistently and boldly carried out, they would result in a saving of expense on architecture and installation, so leaving more money for actual work on the collections; and they would, in the various ways that I have indicated, effect a saving of time, thus permitting the curator to make better use of the material at his command. In this firm belief, I ask for these proposals the serious consideration of the large number of people who to-day are interested in museums.