The second mastodon found in 1801 has had a more varied history. In 1803 Rembrandt Peale and his brother Rubens carried it to England. It was exhibited before the Royal Society. While in London, Rembrandt Peale wrote his "Historical Disquisition on the Mammoth." An attempt to sell the skeleton to Napoleon was undertaken, but war broke out with England which prevented the deal being completed. Peak's sons brought it back to this country and they made a southern trip, exhibiting the mastodon as far south as Charleston. Later, in 1813, Rembrandt started a museum in Baltimore[1] on similar lines to that of his father's in Philadelphia. In this museum the mastodon found a home. This became later the Baltimore Museum, from which in 1846 it was purchased by Dr. Warren and taken to Boston for comparison with his very perfect skeleton and placed in the Warren Museum on Beacon Hill. With Warren's mastodon it was bought from the Warren estate by J. P. Morgan and is now in the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and is called the Baltimore mastodon. This is all. that is known of the fate of the collections of Peale's Museum.
A point that has been particularly confusing to historians is the fact that Peale's Museums were located in both New York and Baltimore. In this connection it will become necessary to refer briefly to Peale's sons.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century Rubens Peale and his brother Rembrandt attempted to found in Baltimore a museum with some duplicate specimens given them by their father. This museum was discontinued after one year.
In 1813, however, Rembrandt Peale, who was a better artist than his father, but was less of a naturalist, moved to Baltimore and in the following year opened a museum and art gallery on Holliday Street in a building that afterward became the Baltimore City Hall. The museum finally passed out of his hands, becoming the Baltimore Museum, which was bought by Barnum in 1845. In the early twenties Rembrandt opened a museum in New York, on Broadway, opposite the City Hall. This museum passed out of his hands into that of a stock company, which, after trying to compete with Barnum's American Museum, was obliged to sell out to the great showman in 1842.
When Charles Willson Peale retired, he placed his son Rubens in his place as director of the Philadelphia Museum with the secret hope that with the opportunities at his disposal he would become a naturalist of world-wide reputation. However, Reubens was apparently not much of a naturalist, but during the years that he was director he devoted himself to making the museum self-supporting rather than increasing the value of its collections. For a while, it would seem about 1841, at
- ↑ Scharf, "History of Baltimore."
