COMMERCIAL MUSEUMS Commercial museums show resources, industries and commercial products and are chiefly maintained by and for business men. In one, for instance, are shown boats, nets and the whole salmon industry, from the salmon to the can, or coal, with models of mines and pictures, so that if a coal man's visiting friend had insufficient time to visit the mine, he could get a good idea of it in town. Such museums appeal to business men chiefly because they advertise their wares. Art museums of the past all too frequently exhibited a few old masters and broken sculptures, while the art curator sat like an owl clothed in unapproachable dignity. Now the best of them encourage beautiful handicrafts among the humbler workers, and take an interest in beautifying the place where they are located, as by advising on town planning, on the archi tecture of public buildings and bridges, on the laying-out of public and private gardens, on the mural decoration of such places as schools and theaters and on the artistic furnishing of houses. The great artists who painted the old masters and modelled the now highly prized though broken sculptures of antiquity no doubt also did much more to beautify their cities and assist their citizens to live beautiful lives than is indicated by the broken bits of statuary dug up and shown in museums. They probably had fine gardens themselves and worked for civic improvement in all esthetic lines. A NATIONAL MUSEUM A national museum might include several kinds of museums or all kinds; certainly it is better able to do scientific work, special work, and cover vast areas than museums which have less financial backing and which are unable to send expeditions to far countries or to employ highly paid specialists. A national museum may present samples of all kinds of museums as patterns to the other museums of the country. A city wishing to establish a children's museum, for instance, may first study the children's museum hall in a national museum. Aimless museums are evolving into institutions of definite and useful purposes. It is now known that each should do the work it was founded to do and is supported to accomplish, that a scientific museum is out of place in a town that is not a scientific center, a university museum is appropriate only in a university, a commercial museum is wasted except in a great mart, and a farmers' museum is not the most suitable kind for the city slum. An up-to-date museum in a small town with insufficient funds no longer tries to do what the British Museum in a large town financed by a nation does. A real scientific museum is no longer a hodge podge of a kindergarten museum and a commercial museum. A university museum now plans to differ from a museum solely devoted to scientific research and from a school museum. A museum for the general public is now known to serve the people poorly if it is labeled like a scientific museum, so that its labels do not interpret sciencethat is truth-to the general public in the language of the public. A farmers' museum probably has insufficient funds to devote energy to anything except the farmers' interests. MUSEUM BUILDINGS Museum buildings were built as architectural triumphs, but now more attention is given to building them so they will serve museum purposes. Some museums no longer wait for a fireproof or permanent or larger building, as that is certainly a waste of time. I once knew of a professor who complained that he could not teach a number of interested students because he had no class room, but I believe I can recall hearing of certain great teachers of antiquity, who taught their disciples by the roadside, without either class room or place to lay their heads, and this idea also applies to museums, for, after all, the whole outdoors is the best museum. A corner in every school-house may be a museum; a nook in every board-of-trade building may serve the same purpose. Much may be learned in a cheap inflammable building, and so in it may be made a more useful museum than are some poorly managed museums possessing fireproof structures costing thousands of dollars. SOURCES OF MUSEUM MATERIAL The inexpensive bee from home may be as interesting and useful or more interesting and more useful than the expensive orang-outang from afar. There is enough material near a museum for all the collections it has room to house. The fish and shell fish of the river, the frogs of its banks, the insects and plants of the door yard, the birds in the trees, the animals near by, the minerals, rocks and fossils of the hills, all offer useful material for research, education and recreation. Few people can answer the simplest questions about these things and more such specimens can be collected in an hour than can be labeled with encyclopedic labels in a year, to say nothing of properly preparing and preserving them. Some museums have many friends; for instance, for years the Barnum and Bailey Circus had all its rare animals which died on the road preserved and sent to a museum. EXHIBITS A hall of museum exhibits is often like a great book, an encyclopedia, where each description is illustrated with a real object. A library has books containing descriptions sometimes illustrated with pictures, maybe even colored pictures, but a museum has the actual object to illustrate its descriptive label. In the early stages of museum evolution, birds and animals were stuffed for exhibition and often the animals looked like bags with four legs. Now such exhibits are made by artists. Instead of stuffing a skin a sculptor models the form of the animal as if it were alive, but with its skin removed. Then The Rocky Mountains A RECREATION AND TOURIST OR VACATION MUSEUM. the skin is placed over this form, which brings out the real anatomy of the animal. Even exhibits to illustrate man are made in a similar way. Plaster casts are made of various native tribes. These are posed as engaged in the typical activities, colored to resemble the living people, dressed in the proper costumes, and placed among the natural surroundings in front of a painting made by an expert artist, to illustrate the home country. This work can not be done by untrained men, but must be accomplished by artisans, mechanics and artists who have had very special training each in his own particular line. Sometimes in a country of millions of inhabitants there is no man trained in a certain special kind of work, so that a museum often has to send across the sea or to some equally far-away place for a skilled mechanic. Even Japanese, Eskimos and Indians are employed in one of our largest museums. Some exhibits are made especially to be pedagogic, as, for instance, to show the life of a moth from egg to adult. Such exhibits are visited by school teachers with their classes. Sometimes models teach quite as much as actual specimens. A model of a mosquito made many times larger than the insect itself shows us how to cope with malarial fever and yellow fever. We could not see the means by which the mosquito transmitted these diseases by looking at the mosquito herself, |