Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/193

Rh of other research schools and museums and especially in acting as a central institution for the collection and distribution of research materials and a storehouse for valuable morphological material which has been studied and is to be conserved for future comparisons. The Wistar Museum was instituted in 1808 by Dr. Casper Wistar and incorporated as an independent institution in 1893 to foster and increase and make useful the museum originally known as the Wistar, or Wistar and Horner Museum—the first museum of human anatomy in America—and to promote researches in human and comparative anatomy. A charter was secured from the state of Pennsylvania, a modern fireproof building and endowment being given by General Isaac J. Wistar to maintain the equipment. This endowment has been most generously doubled and quadrupled several times over since 1893 by the same donor, almost without the knowledge of its board of managers.

During the past twelve years the museum of the institute has multiplied its collections by six and their value by fifty, researches have been encouraged and much valuable work has been turned out, not to mention the great use which has been made of its museum (which is open free to the public), by students of medicine and natural history from the various educational institutions. The line in which the Wistar Institute has made decided progress is in museum technique; the development of new methods of exhibiting specimens, new dust proof steel and glass cases, new form of glass exhibition vessels, the value of which has been recognized both at home and abroad. Most of this work, especially the experimental part, is done in its own machine shops, and it is likely that a high degree of technical skill will be developed here. This in itself enables the institute to be of great assistance to research anatomy, especially in those