Page:The museum, (Jackson, Marget Talbot, 1917).djvu/69

Rh seem advisable. The janitors by day and watch- men by night are considered sufficient protection for any museum. The extraordinary difference between the frequency with which fire breaks out in this country in comparison with the rarity of its occurrence in Europe, makes an especially strong plea against providing in the museum, rooms which shall be occupied by a family.

Machinery should be kept as far as possible from the main building. In a large museum where a number of boilers are necessary for heating purposes and where an electric plant supplies the power to run the ventilating and lighting systems, this plant is usually placed either outside the museum entirely or in a court. In the old days when the coal supplies were kept on the floor of the boiler house and shovelled in by hand, there was invariably a large amount of dirt which could not be avoided. Now, however, when all up-to-date museums are putting in a self-feeding system of furnaces, the coal or oil is confined in bins or tanks and is passed from them through an automatic device, onto the fire. With such a device the boiler rooms can be kept as clean as any part of the museum. There is a minimum of fire danger, as the fire box is practically never opened. Of course it is necessary to provide especially thick walls with few openings and to avoid