Museums and the Research Worker

Abstract

SOME aspects of recent criticism of ethnographical collections in the museums of Great Britain are considered on p. 179 of this issue of NATURE. It cannot be emphasized too frequently that the great national collections—the question under discussion cannot affect the smaller museums except in so far as they are prepared to specialize—being supported out of public funds, it is their bounden duty to perform a function of public utility ; whether that may be, as is now generally required of them, that they should take their share in making efficient and supplementing the machinery of general education, or the more highly specialized function of assisting the research worker. To the latter rather than to an attachment to a traditional system must be attributed the classificatory organization which has been subjected to criticism. For it must not be forgotten that the great national collections, as well as the smaller ethnographical museums, some highly specialized, such as the Pitt-Rivers Museum at Oxford, the Museum of Archæology and Ethnology at Cambridge, or the Manchester University Museum, have been the laboratories for the scientific researches of the technologist in the broader sense, the student of material culture. It is upon this class of evidence that the archæologist, the ethnologist and the student of early culture generally so largely rely. In the modern museum building, however, the trend of development is to make provision for the worker in technological research by withdrawing the bulk of the material in which he is interested from public exhibition, while the public galleries are given over to the more striking objects or to those of most educative value to the public. Doubtless when more space is given to our great public collections, the same method of procedure will be followed, and the public galleries will then be devoted to regional methods of display, in so far as these may have approved themselves as the most effective for purposes of instruction.