The Geographical Museum

Abstract

T HE Central Geographical Museum in Leningrad has this year (1929) celebrated its tenth anniversary. It may therefore be a not inopportune moment to discuss some general principles regarding the construction of geographical museums, using in illustration the experience of myself and my collaborators in the Leningrad Museum. At the time of the great German geographers, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-I859) and Karl Ritter (1779-1859), the ideas of geographical science and its methods of investigation were fairly clear, if somewhat different from those of today. In this same period, exactly one hundred years ago, the great Russian writer Gogol first emphasized the need of a close connection between geography and graphic art. One might have expected the geographical museum to follow. That it did not is to be ascribed to various causes. In the first place, after the death of Humboldt and Ritter there began a great specialization in the natural sciences which constitute the foundation of geography, and little by little the opportunity for geographical synthesis was lost. Indeed, by I88I among the assembled geographers of the International Geographical Congress at Venice we see much confusion as to objects and methods of geography. In the second place, in the time of Humboldt and Ritter cartography was little developed. Even the greatest geographical works often were not provided with maps. Photography was in its early stage, and graphic representations of the geographical landscape were still very conventional and unrealistic while reproduction in color was entirely unknown. Furthermore, the rapidly growing museums of the various branches of natural history and the humanistic sciences devoted their attention exclusively to the exhibition of material articles in accordance with their natural classification, paying no attention to geographical distribution or explanatory maps or geographical pictures. They were needlessly one-sided and, confined to their narrow specialties, with the exception of the art and zoological museums, they were visited almost exclusively by the specialist. Thus the geographical aspects of museum exhibition, from being neglected, became discredited; and for a long time the idea of a geographical museum entirely lacked support. 642