Page:The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University p16.jpg

16 in full-size reproductions by the German Emperor, cannot help being a revelation to American students.

In the next place, this museum, it seems to me, is destined to form a bond of union between the various studies relating to different phases of national life. Modern scholarship suffers from over-specialization. The historical student, the philologist, the student of art, the literary critic, each cultivates his own field, often quite unaware of what is going on in neighboring pastures, quite forgetful of the fact that national life is a unit, that it is the common soil from which spring forth the most diversified and yet allied activities, and that only by considering all these activities in their relation to each other and to this common soil can we arrive at a just estimate of their significance. This museum, I trust, will help to counteract this narrow specialization, by becoming a meeting ground for the art student and the philologist, the student of political as well as of literary history. It is not to set up a new specialty; it is to embrace national civilization as a whole by bringing before our eyes the outward forms of this civilization in its successive stages. How the lake-dwellers lived in prehistoric Switzerland; what kind of armaments and household utensils were used by the Germanic tribes of the era of the migrations; in what kind of boats the Anglo-Saxons and the Norsemen crossed the seas; how they buried their dead; what were the types of the Anglo-Saxon, the Scandinavian, the Frankish, the Bavarian, the Swabian farmhouse; what was the development of religious sculpture in Germany during the Middle Ages; what was the scheme and the development of the mediaeval castle; what was the architectural character of the German city in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, its fortifications, its public buildings, its private houses; what was the stage of the miracle-plays and moralities; what was the development of book-printing; what was the Wittenberg of Luther's time, the Weimar of Goethe's—these are some of the sights which our Museum will offer, and in a measure already offers, partly through models and photographs, but largely through plaster casts and other full-size reproductions of the original works of art and industry.

Let me illustrate by one or two examples from Emperor William's collection how such a museum as this appeals to a variety