: More Science from an Easy Chair by Lankester E Ray Edwin Ray Sir - Science; Natural history

@FreeBooks

Posted in: #FreeBooks #FreeBooksIndia #FreeBooksApp #gg

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

the custom of separating pictures from other museum objects) there grew up in London, under the State Department of Education, a vast collection of all kinds of works of art of all countries and ages, including pictures, which is now sumptuously housed in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Though I propose to write here with special reference to "museums," in the more limited sense as repositories of objects which are the bases of our knowledge of the history of man and his arts, and as the storehouses of specimens which in the same way are the material by the study of which we arrive at a knowledge of the history of the earth, and of the living things which have existed, and of others which still exist on its surface--yet it is obvious that the general purposes of all collections of interesting objects and their arrangement for public use and benefit must be the same, although there are special purposes in view in regard to some collections which do not exist in regard to others. Not long since Mr. Claude Phillips ably set forth some of the principles which should guide the arrangement and exhibition of objects in an art museum, and criticised the plan at present adopted in the Victoria and Albert Museum. As I hold views in regard to the arrangement of natural history museums which are very similar to his, I think it may be useful to explain here what they are.

I may point out that nearly every branch of knowledge should have--in a civilised well-provided community--its collection of material objects, either specimens, models, or ancient examples and remains, which should be "records" to be religiously preserved for future reference and comparison by expert students, whilst others should be there to serve as demonstrations of "great" facts of nature or of human art--direct and straightforward appeals--to the ordinary intelligent man. You might well have a museum of astronomy, containing models of the solar system showing the relative distances and sizes of the heavenly bodies--as well as modern and ancient astronomical instruments, and the records obtained by their use. Again, you might have , at the other end of the scale in dignity and age, a museum illustrating the history and present developments of the smelting of iron and other metals, their purification, their alloying, and properties--as also a museum of paper-making and one of the steam engine and its modern rivals. In such cases the purpose of the museum would be plain enough and comparatively easy to carry out.

Most museums which have come into existence within the last 200 years suffer from the fact that they are mere enlargements of the ancient collector's "cabinet of rare and curious things," brought together and arranged without rhyme or reason. No one has ever attempted to say what is precisely the aim and intention as a public enterprise of any of our great museums, and accordingly there has been no consideration, discussion, or agreement as to the methods of collection, selection, arrangement, exhibition, and storage of the objects assembled within their walls. Thousands, even millions of pounds, have been expended on the building of museums, on the purchase of specimens, on cases and cataloguing, and on the salaries of directors, and keepers, and assistants, yet the museums remain, so far as any declaration of purpose and principle is concerned, mere "repositories," as in the words of the old Act of Parliament constituting the British Museum--for the use and enjoyment of the public, it is true, but without any expression of a conception of how that use and enjoyment is to be limited so as to make them something better than a dime-show, or how any serious purpose is to be achieved by their costly housing and up-keep. No doubt various directors and keepers have from time to time shown intelligence and laboured to make museums not only places of enjoyment and "edification," but also the means of increasing knowledge and rendering service to the State. But the scope of our public museums, and the principles and methods by which it may be realised, have never been agreed upon, and consequently are not definitely recognised by the State nor by the curiously ill-chosen committees of managers, or trustees, to whose tender mercies the ultimate control of these institutions is confided--apparently by haphazard or misapprehension.

The notion of a town corporation, or of the central government at this or that date, has been that museums are best controlled and public money expended in connection with them by persons who know nothing about the real importance of the collections, and receive no guidance from any scheme or statutable declaration of specific purpose drawn up by a competent authority. I will endeavour to state what those purposes should be.

When one tries to estimate what is really the value to the community of public "museums," one is led inevitably to the conclusion that their most important purpose--whether they are museums of natural history, of antiquities, or of art--is to serve as safe and permanent "repositories" for specimens which are costly and difficult to obtain--not to be either "picked up" or readily "housed" by everybody, and at the same time of real importance as "records." The first and most commanding duty of those who set up and maintain a public museum is to preserve actual things as records--records of the existence in this or that locality of each kind of plant and animal, records of the former existence of extinct plants and animals, with irrefragable certainty as to the locality and the exact strata in which they were found--records of prehistoric man, his weapons and art, and of the animals found with them, records of modern times. Everyone is familiar with this duty of the State and of local public bodies, when it is a matter of preserving written and printed records. They are preserved in various public offices and libraries, and are continually being studied by experts and copied in print, so as to furnish us with accurate knowledge of the past.

It is the first and leading business of museums to collect and preserve, with great accuracy as to the locality and circumstances in which each was found, the actual concrete things which are the records of nature, and of the various stages of man's art and industries in every region of the world, just as a library or the Record Office preserves manuscripts and printed documents and books. Collections of such specimens are often made by private individuals, and become too cumbersome for him or his heirs to keep in order. They are then frequently given to a public museum, and I regret to say in many provincial museums are neglected and become mere rubbish, even if they were not so when first given. Often such gifts are rubbish before they are received, and should never have been accepted. But in a great many instances the local museum of a country town is nothing but a rubbish-heap, because the townspeople will not spend the money necessary to obtain the services of a capable curator and to provide cases, labels, catalogues, and attendance. The town councillors usually know nothing about the museum or the value of the objects gathered there, and do not recognise the duty of making it an orderly and carefully tended storehouse of the records of Nature and antiquity of the neighbourhood. Too frequently the town museum is made the means of gratifying the vanity of some local collector, who hands over all sorts of ill-chosen, badly preserved specimens to its ignorant guardians, and is advertised by labels on the cases and by votes of thanks, whilst valuable records placed there in a previous generation are swept into a corner or broken and cast into the cellar in order to make space for the new rubbish!

Unless funds are found to place a specially educated man at the head of a local museum, the museum had better be shut, and such of its contents, as may be desired, offered to one of the big city museums or to the National Museum in London. It is no child's play, maintaining and guarding efficiently a museum which contains "records." It would be a good thing were a committee of naturalists and antiquaries to visit the local museums of the United Kingdom and report on the efficiency of their guardianship and the state of the treasures which they contain. I know two provincial museums very well in which extremely valuable records of prehistoric man and of wonderful extinct animals--found in the neighbourhood and preserved by those who established the museums fifty years ago--are utterly neglected and destroyed by loss of the labels and mixing up of the specimens, in consequence of the death of the persons originally interested in the museum and of the refusal of the town councils to find money to pay for the care of the collections. There can be little doubt that in the present state of local interest in such matters all really important record specimens should find their way to the British Museum in London, where, if accepted, their preservation, so far as it is humanly possible, is assured. That is the distinctive and most creditable feature of our great State-supported museum. At the same time it seems obvious that the records of a provincial area can be, and should be, kept in the county town museum, with a detail and completeness impossible elsewhere, and that it should be the pride of the county to be able to show to a stranger full records of the distinctive features of its natural history and antiquities.

It is clear that whatever failures in this respect may be inevitable in those hopelessly starved and mismanaged "museums" at present surviving to bear witness to the decay of public spirit and intelligent culture in our country towns, the prime duty of the great London museum is to preserve "records" with the greatest nicety and readiness for reference, whilst the duty of actively adding to these records from all parts of the Empire, and, therefore, of the world, and that of minutely studying and reporting upon the collections so obtained and guarded, follow as a matter of course. These collections are the absolutely necessary foundation for the building-up of our knowledge of Nature and of man. We can never say that this branch of scientific knowledge is valuable and that another is a mere fanciful pursuit. Every year it becomes more and more clear that unexpectedly some apparently insignificant piece of detailed scientific knowledge may become of value to the State and to humanity at large. Everyone knows that geology has a great practical value in mining, water supply, and various kinds of engineering, also that botany, as represented by the great State institution at Kew, is of immense value to those who introduce useful plants from one part of the world for cultivation in another. But of late we have seen that entomology--"bug-hunting" as it is scornfully termed--is a science upon which hang not only the revenue of an Empire, but also the lives of millions of men. Destructive insects must be known with the utmost accuracy in order to stop their injury to crops in the distant lands which they inhabit, and also in order to check the diseases carried by them which sweep off vast herds of costly cattle. The mosquitoes and the tsetze flies have been, only recently, proved to be the causes, the carriers, of diseases--malaria, yellow fever, and sleeping sickness--which annually have killed hundreds of thousands of men, colonists as well as natives. I was able to bring together at the Natural History Museum collections of mosquitoes from every part of the world, amounting to thousands of specimens and to some hundreds of kinds. The study of these and of the tsetze flies by skilled entomologists employed in the museum has been a necessary part of the steps now being taken everywhere to preserve human population from the attacks of certain deadly kinds among them, distinguished from the others which are harmless.

Thus, then, it seems that the first and most important purpose for which great "museums" exist is that of "the making of new knowledge"--the increase of science--by furnishing carefully gathered and preserved "specimens" of all kinds, and by working out the history and significance of those collections. But there is a second and distinct purpose which is often ignorantly put in the first place. It is of less importance and quite unlike the first in the methods necessary for its attainment, and yet is conveniently and satisfactorily carried out in conjunction with the first. This second and distinct purpose is the exhibition of such portions of the collections in a museum as are suitable for exhibition in public galleries, so chosen, arranged, lighted and labelled as to afford to the public at large the maximum of enjoyment and edification. This is, as it were, a readily accessible enjoyment given to the public in recognition of the large sums of public money expended on the severer and less easily appreciated enterprise of the museum. The public galleries of a museum, whether of natural history, antiquities or art, should not contain the bulk of the collection, but only special things, carefully selected, and equally carefully placed in case or on wall, with artistic judgment as to space-bordering and colour of background, and with scientific perfection of illumination, so as to produce the "just" impression on the leisurely visitor. The public "exhibit" should be arranged so as to draw attention to a series of important facts of structure or quality clearly shown by the specimens, whether they are natural products or works of art, and these facts should be described in printed labels fully, and the reason for attaching importance to them explained at sufficient length. The man who arranges the public galleries of a public museum, should have a special gift of exposition in plain language, and be able to separate the essential from the non-essential, the significant from the redundant.

It is important to make a complete distinction between an exhibition intended for the general public and that intended for advanced students in schools, colleges and universities. The confusion of these two kinds of exhibition is the cause of the failure of many museums and of the dislike with which most people regard a visit to them. The public museum--metropolitan or local--should not include in its purpose the "academic" instruction of schoolboys and university students. That requires a different kind of museum, which is provided by the school or university, though, of course, the students should also visit the more popular museums. The funds and staff and space required for the one are not sufficient for both. If both are attempted, the unpopular academic, or scholars', exhibition will get the upper hand and suppress the other, since it is a far easier thing to carry out successfully than is the carefully planned exhibition intended for the "edification" of the greater public. The university museum aims at imparting a much greater amount of detailed and elaborate information than does the great public museum, and requires from the student who uses it a special previous study of the subject, and an exceptional amount of attention and pains in examining the objects exhibited.

Too many of the public museums of Europe aim at the "instruction" of the special student rather than at the "edification" of the general public, whilst most aim at nothing at all except showing, without explanation or comment, a vast mass of specimens or pictures, at the sight of which the patient but bored public gapes with wonder. The public galleries of the Natural History Museum in London have been arranged more distinctly with a view to the edification of the public than those of any other museum which I know. But they still contain too large a number of specimens, and still require an immense amount of work in weeding, selection and labelling, and in deliberately making the specimens exhibited tell a tale which is worth remembering, and can be remembered. Except in the case of the larger specimens, and especially those of fossilized skeletons and shells of extinct animals, it must be remembered that the bulk of the specimens in that, as in every other large museum, are contained in cabinets protected from the destructive action of light, and arranged for the most part in rooms to which access is obtained only by serious workers after special application. The fishes and other animals preserved in alcohol are kept in a special fire-proof "spirit-building."

Free books android app tbrJar TBR JAR Read Free books online gutenberg

(0)

Login to post a comment!