Anniversary Address

Extract

The vitality and progress of archaeology so greatly depend on museums for systematic records, for the collation of objects, and for a storehouse of authority, that it seems worth while to review the general situation, and to trace the gradual emergence of objectives, which are now so clear-cut in aim and so exhaustive in scope as to justify us in believing that the museum ideal has at length been defined and stabilized. It is true that the field of activity has been much curtailed since what was first called the Home of the Muses was established by the Ptolemies at Alexandria. The Mouseion was more grandiose in scale and more liberal in its appeal than anything of later date, for not only did it comprise a theatre and banqueting-hall, a botanical garden and a menagerie, but it was a university and the centre from which radiated the whole intellectual life of a vast region. It was perhaps a little disdainful of the past, differing in this respect from the outlook of our own times, and yet in many ways our modern methods are modelled upon Alexandria far more than upon the direct but more recent ancestors of our museums, only dating back two and three hundred years. These were miscellaneous assemblages of bric-à-brac, of which the Tradescant Collection was a fair sample, containing many curiosities of nature to which fabulous properties were ascribed. The Royal Society possessed a bone from the skull of a mermaid. The horn of the unicorn was valued at a tremendous price. Mummies could always be sold to advantage, for when ground into powder their medicinal merits were great. Quack remedies as well as superstition and witchcraft appear to have influenced the collector, though of course in certain branches the enterprise of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries differed but little from our own. The accumulation of coins and medals was for obvious reasons one of the most popular and widespread types of collection; arms and armour were gathered at every Court.