Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 72.djvu/379

Rh or the family nurse. Year by year they have returned to the museum attracted by new features of the work adapted to their growing intellectual needs.

Two years ago, in response to an expressed demand from the boys, the museum began a course of lectures in elementary physics, and in connection therewith invited those interested to come to the museum on certain afternoons to experiment individually with favorite pieces of apparatus. The boys found the utmost pleasure in the liberty thus granted—they experimented under the guidance of a member of the museum staff, they read library books in connection with their experiments and within a few months had set up a wireless telegraph station. The original work of those boys would be a credit to any institution, for they applied themselves regularly and diligently until they had

learned to send and receive wireless messages; meanwhile, the experience of placing the station and keeping it in working order had fitted them to take charge of other stations. Early this summer, when the schools closed, three of these "boys" received offers of remunerative positions with one of the commercial companies to take charge of wireless stations on board of ocean-going steamships—to South America, Panama, West Indies, Bermudas, Key West and other places of interest along the Atlantic seaboard. One of the boys, who had learned to collect and mount insects when he came to the museum as a primary lad, made a very creditable collection of tropical insects which he brought to the museum, carefully preserved and labeled with interesting data.