EDUCATIONAL PAPERS. I.
THE MUSEUM AS AN EDUCATOR
THE MUSEUM DEFINED.
Presumably, when Mr. P. T. Barnum opened a stationary
show in New York and called it “Barnum’s Museuin," he was
not aiming a blow at science; but science felt it, and, in a
measure, is feeling it yet. At that time real public museums
were hardly known in this country; so Americans, very nat-
urally, thought only of the bogus one. Barnum was not the
first to misuse our time—honored name, but be was successful
and was followed by cheap imitators who made matters worse.
To this day, many persons suppose that a museum is “a place
where they show curiosities"—specifically, dwarfs, bearded
ladies and two-headed calves. With such an idea, is it any
wonder that they are indifferent?
Fortunately for us, this absurdity is dying out, and every
well informed person knows that the museum is not a catch- _
penny show. In point of fact, the old Greek word which has
come down to us through the Latin has not changed greatly in
meaning. The museum was, and is, a temple of the Muses, the
home of learning and art. Painting, sculpture and music, his—
tory and science gathered in the old Greek temples—all that
was noblest and best in a glorious civilization; there the great
philosophers taught and authors read their scrolls and Homer
was recited. A few centuries later the Museum at Alexandria
was a library and university, the most renowned of its time.
It has been said, and truly, that museums cannot exist
until the community has reached a high state of civilization;
while men are occupied in the mere struggle for existence they
have small leisure and less inclination to cultivate their minds.
There were no museums during the centuries of turmoil that
followed the destruction of the Roman Empire; there was none
in England until after the civil wars, until the English were no
longer satisfied with squalid country-houses and gross feeding
and the bare rudiments of knowledge, but were reaching after