Museums of Science

The modern museum spares no pains to secure accuracy as well as beauty in these pictorial exhibits or groups. The work begins with the outfitting of expeditions to study the living crea tures in their actual environment. Skilled artists accompany the field parties to make detailed studies of the animals desired. Photographs and moving pictures are secured, and careful notes are made, both of the animals themselves and of the associated animal and plant life, as well as the inanimate features of the environment. Actual specimens are brought back for detailed, scientific study, and even trees, bushes and rock specimens are transported to the museum, when terrestrial groups are concerned. The museum gathers its facts from nature by first-hand ex ploration. The data are analyzed technically, from a scientific standpoint, to evaluate the new knowledge thus obtained, and finally, by means of lifelike exhibits and the popular explanatory labels and handbooks describing them the results are interpreted to the public at large, as a matter of liberal education.

(R. W. M.) Museum Habitat Groups.—A term applied to the exhibition in museums of certain forms of natural history specimens in their native habitat or environment, so as to render the display both attractive and informing. This form of exhibit has been mainly developed in America and is the direct outcome of the modern tendency to make museums more effective in popular scientific education. These groups have been principally utilized in zoology and anthropology, but they are also applicable to botany and geology.

Some suggestion of local environment for mounted specimens, usually confined to a simple support or base, has been practised from time immemorial, but the careful rendering of natural con ditions, including painted backgrounds, rich and elaborate, or simple, as the subject may require, is a recent development, and was given special impetus through the initiative and original methods of the late Carl E. Akeley.

In the preparation and installation of this type of exhibition, the possibilities of which are large, peculiar difficulties and limi tations arise ; each new undertaking presents some new problem of its own, the solution of which may require an unusual degree of adaptiveness and resourcefulness.

General Treatment.

An illusion of nature is the first and basic idea, which calls for a naturalistic treatment of background, even realistic where painting merges into the realism of the f ore ground. The complex nature of these productions has usually been best attained by the collaboration of two or more artists, sculptor and painter with trained artisan assistants, working with mutual understanding and enthusiasm and an acquaintance as intimate as possible with the particular matter in hand.

The more common forms of installation may be classified in progressive steps as follows: (I) in the open hall; (2) in cases glazed on all sides; (3) with background painted on one side, glass on three; (4) background on two adjacent sides, glass on the other two, presenting two aspects; (5) one glazed side or open ing, with curved background, enclosing all sides of the group except the front, thus admitting of a complete illusion, as if one were looking out into the open from a window; (6) the logical last step is the continuous or cycloramic background, viewed from a central vantage point. This form has been successfully applied to certain gregarious groupings. (See MUSEUMS AND ART