ords of our race; and so writings and printed books, with buildings, have been the chief resources of a university. John Harvard founded Harvard College with his library and £800; but now museums, as well as books, are essential to the work of any university. They are peculiarly necessary in an American university; for we are a now conglomerate people, in a fresh land which has no monuments that are not recent, at the opening of an epoch characterized by tremendous new powers drawn by man from nature. These powers have changed profoundly every human occupation and the whole mode of life of civilized man; but their province is the material world and man's material welfare. Indirectly, to be sure, they contribute to intellectual growth; but they have little to do with the creation of beauty or loveliness, or with the growth of piety and righteousness among men. Moreover, these powers may be as mighty for destruction as for construction; for selfish ends as for beneficent.
At the present stage of the world's advance there is more danger everywhere that material may clog spiritual progress, than there was three centuries or six centuries ago, just because of the sudden and disproportionate development of material forces and interests. Especially is this the case in a lusty, gigantic democracy, which sets a high value on crude forces, and does not always remember that a true democracy must be intensely idealistic as well as frankly materialistic. All modern universities need museums which illustrate adequately the materials of the earth's crust, the flora and fauna of both land and sea, and the entire past of the human race, its dwellings, utensils, tools and weapons, its arts, crafts, institutions and religions; but the American universities need especially collections which illustrate systematically and amply the products of the fine arts and the artistic crafts in earlier but surviving civilizations. Such a collection the Germanic Museum is to be.
The development of museums at Harvard University began in the eighteenth century with the collection of physical apparatus, and the museum of medical and surgical specimens. It was continued in the nineteenth with rocks and minerals, with machines and models illustrating the application of science to the useful arts, with dried plants in the Herbarium and living plants
