Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 75.djvu/233

Rh and was allowed to occupy the building as long as he allowed persons to pass through the hall into the State House Garden. His son Rembrandt used the east room on the first floor as his studio, while the entire second floor and tower was given up to the use of the museum.

The best picture that we have of the museum in Independence Hall is found in a letter written by the late George Escol Sellers, of Chattanooga, Tenn., a grandson of Peale, who as a boy and a young man spent much of his time in the museum, and who subsequently became one of its trustees. The period referred to in this letter is about 18201824, twelve years or more after Charles Willson Peale ceased to take an active part in the management, Mr. Rubens Peale being in control. There is very little evidence that much of scientific value was added after the father retired, except, perhaps, the collections of Major Long's expedition to the Rocky Mountains, and Dr. Harlan's anatomical and craniological preparations.

Mr. Sellers, in describing the arrangement of the hall writes:

I will go with you up the stairs and try to lead you through the Museum rooms. At the top of the stairs is a small window where tickets to the Museum are sold. We enter a great door from the landing and find ourselves in what was called the hall lecture room. The bench seats rose all around at such an angle that the two or three upper seats crossed the passage into the Quadruped Room at sufficient height to give headway under them. To the right is a door that is worthy of consideration. (This door leads into the* Quadruped Room, the south-west Room of the State House.) On the west end of the room, the