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University of Texas Bulletin 
No. 2133: June 10, 19'Zl 
Museums---Their Use and Place in Learning and in the Transmission of Culture 
BY 
JAMBS EDWIN PEARCE 
Associate Professor of Anthropology 


PUBLISHED BY 
THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS 
AUSTIN 


Publications of the University of Texas 
Publications Committee: 
FREDERIC DUNCALF C. T. GRAY KILLIS CAMPBELL E. J. MATHEWS 
D. B. CASTEEL C.E.ROWE 
F. W. GRAFF A. E. TROMBLY 
The University publishes bulletins six times a month, so numbered that the first two digits of the number show the year of issue, the last two the position in the yearly series. (For example, No. 1701 is the first bulletin of the year 1917.) These comprise the official publications of the University, publications on humanistic and scientific sub­jects, bulletins prepared by the Bureau of Extension, by the Bureau of Government Research, and by the Bureau of Eco­nomic Geology and Technology, and other bulletins of gen­eral Pducational interest. With the exception of special num­bers, Any bulletin will be sent to a citizen of Texas free on request. All communications about University publications should be addressed to University Publications, University of Texas, Austin. 

1707-8071-7-2-21-2000 
University of Texas Bulletin 
No. 2133: June 10, 1921 
Museums···Their Use and Place in Learning and in the Transmission of Culture 
BY 
JAMBS EDWIN PEARCE 
Auociate Professor of Anthropology 

PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY SIX TIMES A MONTH, AND ENTERED A6 
SECOND·CLASS MATTER AT THE POSTOFFICE AT AUSTIN, TEXAS. 
UNDER THE ACT OF AUGUST 24, 1912 

The benefits of education and of useful knowledge, generally diffused through a community, are eHential to the preservation of a. free govern­ment. 
Sam Houston 
Cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy. . . . It is the only dictator that freemen acknowl· edge •nd the only security that free· men desire. 
Mirabeau B. Lamar 
MUSEUMS-THEIR USE AND PLACE IN LEARNING AND IN THE TRANSMISSION OF CULTURE 
In order to see clearly the function of museums in the preservation and dissemination of knowledge among men, it is well, perhaps, first to discuss briefly the means and methods of preserving knowledge in general. Such dis­cussion will enable us to place a better relative value upon the museum as a means to that end. 
In the primitive stages of human culture, even after man had arrived at rather complicated social manners and customs, the transmission of his culture was de­pendent wholly upon sheer memory. We know that in the societies of Ancient Peru and Mexico and of other places where man was in a like stage of culture, priests and old men generally were charged with the duty of teaching the lore of their peoples to the young and that these teachings took on the form of long, detailed stories of ancestral deeds, of tribal wars, of the exploits of heroes, and of the doings of gods and of their relations with men­stories covering accounts of the origin of man and of the earth and of all things important to men, such as fire, the horse, maize, the olive tree, etc. As time passed, and as culture became more complicated, the folklore of a given people would necessarily become so cumbersome as to constitute a tremendous burden upon the memory. 
So we find men rather early resorting to artificial prac­tices to aid in recalling memories and ideas which might be useful to the race and which were in danger of being lost if trusted entirely to tradition and memory. 
Pictography, reminder devices such as the quipu, the tally stick, and the abacus, and doubtless many petty images that came later to constitute amulets, charms, per­sonal decorations, etc., such as wampun belts, were util­ized to aid the memory and to record in a partial, if vague 
Address delivered before the Texas State Historical Association, in annual meeting at Austin, April 21, 1921. 
way, the accumulated learning of the past. Ultimately, as all know, pictographs passed into hieroglyphics. Great pains were then taken to provide smooth surfaces upon which these characters might be inscribed or painted as records of those happenings and ideas whicli men deemed ­importarit. The monuments of Egypt, the clay tablets of 
Mesopotamia and many other devices of like kind are examples. 
iStill later the hieroglyphics were transformed into al­f)habetical systems, the quipu and abacus were replaced by the Arabic symbols and notation as means of reckoning, and our present methods of keeping records and accounts came slowly into operation. 
Now the .immediate and direct function of writing, in­cluding a mathematical system of notation, is to relieve the memory of the necessity of holding concrete facts in mind. These inventions, then, of alphabets and of figures, have disburdened man's mind of the monstrous quantities of detailed facts which, formerly preserved by memory, are at present relegated to encyclopredias, dictionaries, gazet­teers and books in general. 
As civilization grew apace, the accumulations of knowl-· edge gathered up and recorded in our books have come to press again upon man's mental powers and to make it difficult for any individual to familiarize himself with even the fundamental facts of our culture as recorded in our books, to say nothing of a mastery of the whole. To do the last has long since passed the possibilities of any individual. 
The difficulties of mastering all our written learning are not quite pertinent to the inquiry we are making in this paper, but the inadequacy of these records to express the exact and the "'.hole truth is certainly very pertinent and it is this fact that justifies our interest in collections of things of human origin or of human association which il­lus_trate the arts, industries, and ways of man. 
The difficulties of expressing memories, ideas, · and thoughts exactly in language, spoken or written, have long attracted the attention of thoughtful men and, in fact, constitute the greatest single difficulty in the handing down of knowledge from generation to generation. There is no possibility of describing exactly in words a memory or even an object so that the language will convey the same impression to one who may read it that was in the mind of the writer. Approximation to exactness of ex­pression is an art that can be attained only by a life long study and practice and the perfection of which is quite impossible. . 
The result is that all written accounts of man's thoughts or doings are filled with ambiguities, lapses, and imper­fections which make the reading and interpretation of writing perhaps as much an art as the writing itself. Any famous poem in English, for instance, will have dif­ferent shades of meaning and different interpretations in the minds of different readers. 
Furthermore, in the writing of history and in efforts at interpreting institutions the apperceptive mass of past ex­periences and past training in the mind of the writer de­termine, often in the minutest detail, what facts he will select, where emphasis shall be placed, and what shall be the final interpretation, so that no individual account of any­thing that has happened in the world and no individual description of any concrete fact can ever be depended on as complete and final. We supplement the account of one historian with that of another and make all the allow­ances possible for the personality and the particular bias of writers, and even then are sure that the most skillfully put together accounts, drawn from the widest possible range of sources, are far from representing the exact facts. . 
Particularism, that is clinging too tenaciously to a par­ticular theory or explanation, is almost universal in history, sociology, economics, anthropology, and in all branches of learning that attempt to deal with man and his ways. Herbert Spencer derives the whole religious concept from the influence of the dead upon the imagination of the liv­ing, or the worship of ghosts. Tarde declares that all social practice is handed down from generation to gen­eration by imitation. Kid declares that "sense of kind" among men explains all group association and so all socfal organization. None of these men sees the whole truth; each sees a large truth and proceeds to ignore all supple­mentary or contradictory facts or factors, with the result that the interpretations of all of them are radically wrong in places. Particularism, in fact, is more or less unavoid­able, due to the fact that scholars must dwell at length upon certain catagories of facts. The outcome is that in­evitable bias incident to continuous contemplation of the same facts. 
The result is that we have schools of thought in. every line of natural and social science and the lay world won­ders why the doctors and specialists do not agree. All these difficulties have been recognized by thoughtful scholars for centuries, and so efforts at supplementing written records with other methods of preserving' knowl­edge and of pro~oting effective study, such as, for exam­ple, the preservation of artifacts, and relics left behind by men, incident to their ·peculiar ways of living, have · long been practiced. In fact, the understanding and cor­rect interpretation of the cultures of the various peoples of the world involve, in addition to the best possible writ­ten records, the study of the peoples themselves where ac­cess can be had to them, the study of the lands they have occupied, including the whole environment in which they live or have lived, and the culture and character of ad­jacent peoples, as well as a careful study of all the ma­terial things used in their daily living as far as access can be had to such things. 
It is a well known fact that man has left behind him, even in the lowest savagery, fortuitous records of his life which often speak more positively, more accurately, and more eloquently of his manner of living than can be done in the most artful speech. The kitchen middens of early man often reveal, even minutely, his manner of living. We find in them, not only complete and broken tools and 
17•
weapons, indicating the materials of which his imple­ments were made, but even the manner in which they were made. The bones of all the animals he ate are found imbedded in his kitchen refuse. The flint scrapers and the ·knives with which the skins of animals were dressed, the primitive awls and needles with which these skins were sewn together, and other such artifacts speak more accurately to him who knows how to read and inter­pret these things than could many records. 
The examination of the early camp sites of primitive hunters and herders has brought to light a knowledge of the beginnings of the domestication of animals such as the horse, the cow, the sheep, the goat, the pig and others, and considerable light has been thrown upon the origin of do­mestic plants. Burial places have yielded thousands of ar­ticles that have a highly illuminating effect upon the history of man. Nearly all the early peoples of the world have buried with the dead the things to which they were most attached in life and which had most importance to them, the assumption being that they would need the same things in the life beyond. 
All over the surface of the earth are found the first crude stone artifacts of man, consisting in stones merely shaped to a point or an edge for cutting or bruising, and in lands where culture has had a continuous and uninter­rupted history from the earliest beginnings to present day high civilization, all the intermediate gradations of eco­nomic and social evolution are more or less indicated in the things which man has left behind him. Man leaves always his own body on or in the earth when he has done with life, and frequently his remains have been caught up in marshes or deposited in dry caves where they have been preserved to such effect that skilled anatomists are p.ble to get from such remains a good idea of what the race he represented was like. 
We know now from the fossil remains of men in the various museums of Europe that several distinctive races have occupied the soil of that land in bygone ages, all of which have disappeared. ,we can even trace, in very large measure, the history of the final evolution of man in what we now possess in the way of fossil remains of his ancestors and his evolutional history is being added to year by year. 
Among civilized peoples the things left behind are more numerous, of course, and more eloquent still. Men who ­live in cities leave city ruins behind them, and in these ruins are found thousands of imperishable things which record manners and customs of those who used them, sometimes in great detail. Wolfe discovered the remains of nine different cities that had existed at different times on the site of ancient Troy. The debris of the different cities constituted distinctive layers -in which, were found artifacts revealing the manners and customs involved in the different cultures that had flourished on this spot. The same sort of facts have been revealed in the excava­tion of ancient Babylonian and Assyrian cities by Layard, 
and in Egypt by Maspero, Flinders Petrie, and others.. 
In fact, one would have to do much reading in the pub­lished accounts of modern archreological · research before he could begin to realize the extent to which the early life of man has been reconstructed by the examination of the ruins he has left behind him, in ancient Mexico, an­cient Peru, ancient Crete, Greece, and Rome, Assyria and Egypt, India, China, and Japan. 
Even records and means of interpreting records have been uncovered in these researches. Witness the Rosetta Stone, the rock of Bohistun, both of which revealed a whole literature to us, before without meaning. The tablet literature of ancient Assyria and Babylon has brought to light most of the important beginnings of the Hebrew religion, law, and literature, to say nothing of the revelations they are affording us of the intimate life of_ the ancient Mesopotamians themselves. 
An understanding of the evolution of art would be quite 
impossible but for the relics of things which man has deemed 
beautiful and l~ft behind him upon his cave walls, upon his tools and weapons, upon smooth surfaces on which he has scratched or painted the figures of men, animals, etc. One has only to mention the Vapio cups of ancient Greece, the jeweled beetles of ancient Egypt, the beautiful wrought gold chains and the golden trinkets' of the ancient Indians of Columbia, the statuettes and bone and horn engravings of the Cro Magon men of western France in order to realize the tremendous importance of gathering together such things in places where they may be protected and studied in order to trace and understand the development of man's sense of the beautiful. 
In the hands of present day scientists the relics of man's ·past life have often been put together in such a way as to show the almost complete evolution of certain economic or ., artistic developments, even in the minutest detail. It is a revelation to any thoughtful person to see for the first time the Pitt-Rivers collection of weapons at Oxford and to realize how unbrokenly development has run from the crud­est beginnings of mere unshaped flint rocks through the coup de poing, the flint spearhead, the arrowhead, the bolt, crossbow, the bullet, and the explosive shell of our great modern cannon. 
Like collections have been put together to tell the com­plete story of weaving, from the crudest grass baskets to the finest webs from our almost intelligent modern looms and, of pottery, from the simplest crude clay pot to the most re­fined and exquisitely beautiful Sevres or Wedgewood porce­lain of our own time. Likewise the digging stick of primi­tive woman ran through a series of evolutions and ended up in modern steam shovels and caterpillar plows. Each step in the evolution may be illustrated by specimens that lie in the long line of development, found in one part of the world or another. The whole history of power-driven machinery could be worked out in representative specimens from the first log wheel and axle, consisting of a log with the middle portions hewn out to form an axle, the unmodified ends constituting the wheels,f;o the present pneumatic tires of our luxurious limousines and through all the complicated wheels and pulleys of our watches and factory machinery. 
Even the first specimens of inventions so recent as the telephone, the steam engine, the locomotive, the internal combustion engine, the phonograph, and the flying machine, invented but yesterday; would be tremendously interesting and instructive to present-day youth. Forward looking ed­ucators and students of institutional life are coming to real­ize the tremendous importance of preserving the first forms of all concrete things which involve change in human man­ners and customs, with the result that now, in all civilized lands, there are vast museums in which such things are preserved, catalogued and described, and put together with other things, out of which they have developed or which have developed from them, to teach and illustrate in the most forcible way the history of man and his ways. The in­telligent student visiting Europe for the first time will find on his return home that he has spent probably half of his time, even in a flying visit, in museums, and that he has certainly spent his most profitable hours, from the point of view of gathering knowledge, in these institutions. 
The value of museum collections for natural science is very great in certain fields and in certain specific connections in all fields. For example, a great collection of fossils affords the only direct means of studying the life of past geological ages and has given us most of our concrete and positive knowledge of the history of life and of many of the laws governing its changes. The mineral collections of geology are also of great importance and it is only by making large collections of minerals from wide areas that individual stu­dents may hope to find illustrative material for a complete knowledge of mineral substances. Even the perishable re­mains of birds and the skins and bones of animals may be mounted to such effect as to give an exceedingly accurate knowledge of bird and animal life in all parts of the earth to students whom circumstances may confine within the limits of a single city. This fact is illustrated in the mag­nificent ornithological and zoologi<;ial collections of the South Kensington branch of the British Museum. 
The very word "museum" implies the relations of these institutions to history. The word is, of course, related to the term "muse,' "museum" meaning the temple of the muses, and the first forms of museums were collections of books and manuscripts for the preservation of literature and historical facts. The museum of the Greeks and Romans was a place of study, at first a sacred grave, then a temple. Libraries, as we know them, came first and out of them and the cabinet collections of princes and wealthy citizens our museums were differentiated. It is still true that many of the most famous museums are chiefly famous for their collections of manuscripts, rare books and records, as is illustrated by the case of the British Museum. Libraries in contradistinction to museums, are now developed and maintained, particularly in England and the United States, to afford the general public later and cheaper editions of valuable first books and manuscripts in order to prevent the precious original documents from being used up and destroyed. 
It was a perfectly natural development to supplement his­torical records with relics illustrating the matters with which they deal, such as weapons, costumes, personal be­longings of famous personages, etc. Once buildings were provided for the preservation of rare manuscripts and val­uable historical trophies, such places would naturally be­come the sanctuaries of any and all relics of man's life and of natural objects that possessed a curious interest or that might serve to preserve and promote knowledge. Mere curios, accumulating in quantity, would ultimately give rise to scientific and anthropological collections. 
Another development out of the early book and manu­script library or museum, and a natural and inevitable one, 
·is the fine art museum. It is a relatively recent develop­ment for specimens of fine art to be gathered into institu­tions devoted exclusively to their protection and display. The great Louvre is primarily a fine art museum, though it contains many collections that have also historical and an­thropological value. The inevitable tendency as museums grow and their collections become enormous in size is to differentiate them into museums of anthropology, of fine arts, of natural science or natural history, and of literature and history. The scientific collections often become so large as to result in subdivisions, one of the most famous collec­tions of scientific materials in the world being the museum of comparative osteology in the Jardin des Plantes, Paris. This collection contains the mounted skeletons of nearly all known vertebrates and of vast numbers of fossil forms now extinct. The whole is arranged with such system and skill as to make a striking, logical demonstration of the different lines of animal evolution. 
The greatest museum in the world is, of course, the British Museum, and we may go further and say that prob­ably the greatest institution of learning in the world is the British Museum. Its collections have grown until now it occupies many acres of buildings and has spread into dif­ferent parts of the city of London, the vast South Kensing­ton collections being the largest in the aggregate, but the old fine art collections, the manuscripts, and the choicest anthro­pological specimens are still retained in the original build­ing near Russell Square. 
No. one who has not visited Europe as a student of some special line of learning which utilizes museum collections could realize the number, extent, and general importance of museums ill the culture and learning of the old world. Vir­tually every city in Europe of one hundred thousand people or more has its museum, and some of the most famous col­lections in the world are in relatively small cities. This is notably true in Holland, the Dutch having gathered valuable collections in natural science and anthropology from all their distant possessions. Belgium, one-seventieth the size of Texas, with a population about double and possessed of about the same wealth, has a great museum of natural his­tory devoted entirely to Belgium collections. The greatest single anthropological museum in the world is in Berlin; in which there are collections illustrating the manners and customs of man from every part of the earth, and some 
Museums 13 
collections are so complete and representative of the regions from which they came as to force the students who would study the social life of man in such parts to go to Berlin for that purpose. This is true of Mexico, which has been combed by German museum collectors and anthropologists to such effect that the greatest collection of Mexican art and culture relics generally in all the world is to be seen in the anthropological museum in Berlin. 
There are museums, furthermore, i_n all parts of the world that have a white population and that have any aspirations towards progress; for example well organized museums may be found now in Argentina, Brazil, Chili, Peru, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, India, Egypt, China, and Japan, as well as in Europe and in our own country. 
Moreover, all great museums have staffs made up of ex­perts in the different lines in which collections are made and, all the larger ones send out expeditions for gathering collec­tions. They often make researches and extend the bound­aries of knowledge in the most positive and definite way. It is an open question as to whether the museums do not have in their staffs more great first-class research scholars in certain sciences than are to be found in the universities. 
Every important museum in the world publishes a jour­nal, a continuous series of bulletins and voluminous accounts of all special expeditions. In such publications are to be found much of the choicest scientific and anthropological literature. The purchase of the best of these publications, covering all parts of the world, would run into thousands of dollars annually. The cheapest way of securing this literature is by putting out publications which will serve for exchange purposes. 
Such publications serve to inform the rest of the world of researches being carried on, of materials found and o~ things available for exchange, and serve the cause of learn'­ing in many ways. 
In the United States, the wealthy northern and eastern parts naturally take precedence in the possession of mu­seums, the greatest in this country being found iv the Museum of Natural History in New York City. Near this great museum, devoted to scientific and anthropological collections, is the famous Metropolitan Fine Art Museum whose collections would run into hundreds of millions of dollars if sold on the market, and the possession of which makes New York necessarily, ii:i large measure, a fine art center. In fact, the possession of these two museums alone with their vast collections, representing virtually every line of human interest, gives Columbia University, situated near them, a tremendous advantage over other uni­versities not so fortunately situated, in doing the finishing work in nearly all technical lines of learning. The Peabody Museum at Harvard serves that institution to the same pur­pose and contains extensive and valuable collections from ancient Peru, ancient Babylon, Egypt and other parts. The Museum of the Acadmy of Science at Philadelphia and the Museum of the University of Pennsylvania serve that in­stitution in the same way. The Museum of the Univer­sity of Pennsylvania contains probably the greatest single collection of Babylonia tablet literature to be found in the world, with the possible exception of the British Museum. 
The Field Museum of Chicago has vast collections of great value in anthropology and natural science and has just moved into a magnificent new building costing some­thing near three million dollars. There is no doubt that the University of Chicago possesses a great advantage in being situated within easy reach of the collections of this museum. Furthermore, the large endowment fund of the Field Museum amounting to $10,000,000, will enable it to send out research expeditions and to expand its col­lections to such effect as to give it ever increasing import­ance in all lines of learning fostered by museums. 
The National Museum at Washington is coming to be, in the importance and completeness of its collections, rep­resentative of our national greatness. The collections that have been gathered for it through the Bureau of Eth­nology of the Smithsonian Institution and through direct purchase by its staff make it now the first museum in the world for relics representative of North American Indian culture. Moreover, the Cochran Fine Art Gallery, recently given the museum board of regents by an individual ·citizen, will have great importance in reinforcing the value of the National Museum as a <::enter of fine art study. The Smith­sonian collections in various lines of natural science are immediately at hand and the ensemble makes Washington a center of museum activity. 
There are several of the states that have state museums -New York, Louisiana, Ohio, California, and others. Perhaps the Ohio Museum and the laws under which it is organized and managed afford us our best guide in an effort at getting a museum for Texas. The Ohio State Museum was founded by the State Historical Association and the State Archreological Society. Funds were gath­ered from private individuals to begin with, and the mu­seum was opened as a private foundation. About twenty­five years ago, however, these two societies got a law through the legislature of the state providing for the or­ganization and direction of the museum as a state enter­prize, and an annual sum was appropriated for its main­tenance and development. Its board of control is a com­bination affair, partly appointed by the governor and ap­proved by the senate, and partly chosen by the original societies which organized the museum. 
One very interesting feature of the Ohio Museum situa­tion is the fact that they have in that state a law providing that important Indian relics of every kind, deemed of suf­ficient value to justify action by the state, become, as soon as found, state property and pass under the control of the State Museum and Park Commission. Of course, the lands on which these mounds, burial places, Indian mines, and other interesting relics are found, are paid for by the state, but paid for under the right of eminent do­main. 
This enlightened law has put an end in Ohio to vanda­listic practices which would have destroyed most of the value of interesting Indian sites, had not such property at once passed into the hands of the state as soon as dis­coveries on them became known. 
Let us now give attention specifically to the situation in Texas and to the great possibilities for service to higher education and to education in general, in this state by a state museum. In the first place, there is nowhere closer than Chicago a city of more than a million population. St. Louis, the nearest large city, has no great museum, though it has the beginnings of one in the collections of Jefferson Memorial Building. These collections are at present only anthropological and historical. New Or­leans is not sufficiently large and wealthy to support a great museum. The state museum in that city, opposite Jackson Square, contains mainly collections of historical importance but almost none worth mention of an anthro­pological character and there are no scientific collections there at all, as far as the writer knows. To the south of us there are extensive collections in the City of Mexico, · where the people have become awakened to the impor­tance of their ancient civilization in the history of the general culture of mankind, and are Iit>w keeping all the best things found in Mexico for themselves. But the un­stable political conditions of Mexico will preclude that land from becoming a center of cultural and scientific study even if it were more accessible to us than it is. Texas, then, is situated in the heart of a great region in the southwestern part of North America that is without museuni facilities of any sort, the nearest considerable col­lections being at Chicago and Washington, more than a thousand miles away. 
In the old Indian life of the continent, Texas was the transition field between the Indian cultures of Mexico, of the Mississippi valley, and of the Pueblo regions of New Mexico and AriEona. The Bureau of Ethnology at Washington are sure that the connections between these great centers of early culture will be found in Texas and that the unfolding of their relations to one another will be worked out finally only when a complete archreological exploration of this state has been made. 
It has been the privilege of the writer to begin this work under the patronage and with the funds of the Smithsonian Institution, but the· work has barely begun. All accounts of explorations must be published by the Bureau of American Ethnology and are lost to Texas for purposes of exchange. Dr. Morehead, of Amherst Col­lege, working in an independent way last summer, dis­covered in the canons of the Panhandle, what he believes to be the remains of the protomorphic forms of .the old Pueblo culture. The writer has brought with him to this meeting relics found in the immediate neighborhood of Austin, many of which were certainly not produced by the Indians occupying this region when the white man first · came here and which indicate such a high degree of stone .age culture as to support strongly Dr. Fewkes theory that there was a transition of Mexican culture across this state info the Mississippi Valley from which arose the mound 
.builder culture of this last region. The writer feels that it would be little less than a disgrace to our great wealthy state, to allow the work of exploring this field and of gathering its interesting artifacts into collections for study in future ages, to be done by outside people and the in­teresting results carried away to distant centers to serve for the edification and enlightenment of more enterpris­ing populations. 
Numerous collections of Indian artifacts in the hands of private individuals exist in this state. The Schultz collec­tion in San Antonio is one; the Lentz collection at Cuero is one; the collection of Dr. Page at Ladonia is a third; the collection of Captain Aldridge of the State Ranger forces is a fourth ; and there are dozens and dozens of similar col­lections. Some of these are being given to local institu­tions that have no facilities for utilizing them, not even fireproof buildings in which to house and protect them, and nearly every year some of these collections are destroyed by fire, they pass into the hands of unappreciative individ­uals who neglect them or scatter them, and so are lost, or they pass into the hands of museums and collectors in dis­tant parts of the world. Nearly all of these can be had by donation for a state museum as soon as a fireproof building is erected, providing facilities for adequately displaying them. 
In the palreontological field the situation is exactly par­allel to that in the archreological. Yale University has sent several expeditions into the Red Bed regions of the Pan­handle and other areas of Texas, where they have procured fossil remains of very great importance in the history of animal .life on the planet. The fossil history of the horse in North America was virtually finished by Gridley's dis­covery of the Texas fossil horse, Equus Scotti; and more than one palreontologist has made fame for himself and added to the dignity and value of the collections of his museum or university by exploiting the rich fossil beds of Texas. The most famous fossils of this state are to be found now in the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, in the collections of Yale University, and in the Walker Museum of the University of Chicago. The writer has no desire to see research workers interfered with in doing work in the state, but he has very great feeling about Texas not participating in that work_and not gathering into a great collection within the state all the best results of such work for the enlightenment and inspiration of our students in years to come. 
The possibilities of historical collections within the state can be best dealt with by the historians but the writer knows enough to be sure that the situation here is again paralleled by the situation in archreology and palreontology. The magnificent work of the history department of the Uni­versity of Texas in getting copies of manuscripts from the Mexican archives into the state can not be too highly praised, and it affords an illustration of what might be done on a much bigger scale in a much more complete way if funds could be had for the necessary research and build­ings were provided for the proper housing and cataloging of the returns. 
Again, there are several sites in this state of such rare 
value in the history of man as to demand state protection. 
The paintings on the bluff at Paint Rock, the property of Mr. Simms, mark one such place, and the enlightened owner is so eager to see the place properly protected that he has offered to donate it either to the state or to the federal gov­ernment if it can be cared for by placing a guard over it. There is no law in this state however, by which the state can take possession of such a piece of property, and the federal government possesses no lands within the state and so hes­itates to enter so vast a region in such a manner. The re­sult is that this wonderful collection of pictographs is being utterly ruined by stupid, vandalistic whites who are paint­ing their own names with nonsense over and about these old paintings l.n a way that infuriates anyone who has a knowledge of their value. 
There are other places in the state that deserve nearly or quite as much consideration. One is near Athens, Hender­son County, where there are remarkable rock inscriptions near an interesting campsite; the mounds at Alto afford an­other illustration; some of the caves along the Devil's River constitute a fourth, and doubtless there are numerous others of which the writer does not know. 
Finally, the palreontological and archreological relics gathered .into the state museum from within the borders of the state can be made use of, by exchange, for securing 'col­lections in those lines from all the rest of the world, so that we might easily have here in time, as the result of our rich local field, collections that would attract the attention of students from everywhere for their completeness and rep­resentative character. No one who is familiar with the history of the rich museum . collections of the old world and of the older and richer portions of this country, can fail, it seems to the writer, to realize the importance of starting at once to found and build up a museum in Texas which shall conserve for future generations all the inter­esting things suitable for museum purposes that lie so nu­merously over the surface and within the soil of our broad state. 
To sum up: 
1. Museums are essential to preserve specimens of man's arts and the relics of his past to supplement written records and to aid in preserving, extending and disseminating a knowledge of himself; also to preserving and protecting many natural objects and animal and plant remains for the furtherance of natural science. 
2. 
So largely do progressive communities have them that their presence is one of the surest marks of intelligence and enlightenment. 

3. 
The situation in Texas is such as not only to invite but virtually to demand the early founding of a museum that shall gather up the rich materials of this state and of Mexico, New Mexico and other adjacent parts into perma­nent collections for the enlightenment and inspiration for her youth throughout the years to come. 

4. 
Texas should explore on her own account, her rich fossil beds and archreological sites, gather the returns into her own state museum and publish the accounts of such researches in a museum journal and museum bulletins of her own editing and printing. These would bring her like publications from all parts of the civilized world and the cost of such printing would be returned several times over in the value of library materials thus obtained.