Such a museum, if residents who are interested in these sciences take proper pains, may be brought to a great degree of perfection and be unique of its kind. It will tell both natives and strangers exactly what they want to know, and possess great scientific interest and importance. Whereas the ordinary lumber-room of clubs from New Zealand, Hindoo idols, sharks' teeth, mangy monkeys, scorpions, and conch shells--who shall describe the weary inutility of it? It is really worse than nothing, because it leads the unwary to look for the objects of science elsewhere than under their noses. What they want to know is that their "America is here," as Wilhelm Meister has it.
On the contrary, I found that the task of putting the truths learned in the field, the laboratory and the museum, into language which, without bating a jot of scientific accuracy shall be generally intelligible, taxed such scientific and literary faculty as I possessed to the uttermost; indeed my experience has furnished me with no better corrective of the tendency to scholastic pedantry which besets all those who are absorbed in pursuits remote from the common ways of men, and become habituated to think and speak in the technical dialect of their own little world, as if there were no other.
A day will come when there will be no battlefields, but markets opening to commerce and minds opening to ideas. A day will come when the bullets and bombs are replaced by votes, by universal suffrage, by the venerable arbitration of a great supreme senate which will be to Europe what Parliament is to England, the Diet to Germany, and the Legislative Assembly to France. A day will come when a cannon will be a museum-piece, as instruments of torture are today. And we will be amazed to think that these things once existed!
He talks about you like you're something he found in a natural history museum.
It’s been a while. Maybe I want to admire it. Like you’re a work of art hanging on a wall in the middle of a museum.” He tilted his head, waved a finger at her. “Go on. Spread those pretty thighs. Let me see.
A Local Museum should be exactly what its name implies, viz., "Local"--illustrating local Geology, local Botany, local Zoology, and local Archaeology.
"I went to the museum where they had all the heads and arms from the statues that are in all the other museums." -- Steven Wright
The Least Successful Collector Betsy Baker played a central role in the history of collecting. She was employed as a servant in the house of John Warburton (1682-1759) who had amassed a fine collection of 58 first edition plays, including most of the works of Shakespeare. One day Warburton returned home to find 55 of them charred beyond legibility. Betsy had either burned them or used them as pie bottoms. The remaining three folios are now in the British Museum. The only comparable literary figure was the maid who in 1835 burned the manuscript of the first volume of Thomas Carlyle's "The Hisory of the French Revolution", thinking it was wastepaper. -- Stephen Pile, "The Book of Heroic Failures"
Artistic ventures highlighted. Rob a museum.
In a museum in Havana, there are two skulls of Christopher Columbus, "one when he was a boy and one when he was a man." -- Mark Twain
I am getting into abstract painting. Real abstract -- no brush, no canvas, I just think about it. I just went to an art museum where all of the art was done by children. All the paintings were hung on refrigerators. -- Steven Wright
Literature is mostly about having sex and not much about having children. Life is the other way around. -- David Lodge, "The British Museum is Falling Down"
"Our journey toward the stars has progressed swiftly. In 1926 Robert H. Goddard launched the first liquid-propelled rocket, achieving an altitude of 41 feet. In 1962 John Glenn orbited the earth. In 1969, only 66 years after Orville Wright flew two feet off the ground for 12 seconds, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and I rocketed to the moon in Apollo 11." -- Michael Collins Former astronaut and past Director of the National Air and Space Museum</p>
You are transported to a room where you are faced by a wizard who points to you and says, "Them's fighting words!" You immediately get attacked by all sorts of denizens of the museum: there is a cobra chewing on your leg, a troglodyte is bashing your brains out with a gold nugget, a crocodile is removing large chunks of flesh from you, a rhinoceros is goring you with his horn, a sabre-tooth cat is busy trying to disembowel you, you are being trampled by a large mammoth, a vampire is sucking you dry, a Tyrannosaurus Rex is sinking his six inch long fangs into various parts of your anatomy, a large bear is dismembering your body, a gargoyle is bouncing up and down on your head, a burly troll is tearing you limb from limb, several dire wolves are making mince meat out of your torso, and the wizard is about to transport you to the corner of Westwood and Broxton. Oh dear, you seem to have gotten yourself killed, as well. You scored 0 out of 250 possible points. That gives you a ranking of junior beginning adventurer. To achieve the next higher rating, you need to score 32 more points.
Great Moments in History: #3 August 27, 1949: A Hall of Fame opened to honor outstanding members of the Women's Air Corp. It was a WAC's Museum.
During the last week in November a decree was issued by the Council of People’s Commissars, changing the name of the Winter Palace to “People’s Museum,” entrusting it to the complete charge of the artistic-archæological commission, and declaring that henceforth all Governmental activities within its wall were prohibited....
"I am prejudiced against Beauchamp," said Albert, drawing Franz away, and leaving the former to finish his philosophical dissertation with Debray. The Villefort vault formed a square of white stones, about twenty feet high; an interior partition separated the two families, and each apartment had its entrance door. Here were not, as in other tombs, ignoble drawers, one above another, where thrift bestows its dead and labels them like specimens in a museum; all that was visible within the bronze gates was a gloomy-looking room, separated by a wall from the vault itself. The two doors before mentioned were in the middle of this wall, and enclosed the Villefort and Saint-Meran coffins. There grief might freely expend itself without being disturbed by the trifling loungers who came from a picnic party to visit Pere-la-Chaise, or by lovers who make it their rendezvous.
"Yes, and a most remarkable bird it proved. I don't wonder that you should take an interest in it. It laid an egg after it was dead--the bonniest, brightest little blue egg that ever was seen. I have it here in my museum."
In addition to this, they had behind them the battery, which was still thundering. It was necessary that it should be so, or they could never have been wounded in the back. One of their cuirasses, pierced on the shoulder by a ball from a biscayan,[9] is in the collection of the Waterloo Museum.
D----, Dec. 16, 18--. MY GOOD MADAM: Not a day passes without our speaking of you. It is our established custom; but there is another reason besides. Just imagine, while washing and dusting the ceilings and walls, Madam Magloire has made some discoveries; now our two chambers hung with antique paper whitewashed over, would not discredit a chateau in the style of yours. Madam Magloire has pulled off all the paper. There were things beneath. My drawing-room, which contains no furniture, and which we use for spreading out the linen after washing, is fifteen feet in height, eighteen square, with a ceiling which was formerly painted and gilded, and with beams, as in yours. This was covered with a cloth while this was the hospital. And the woodwork was of the era of our grandmothers. But my room is the one you ought to see. Madam Magloire has discovered, under at least ten thicknesses of paper pasted on top, some paintings, which without being good are very tolerable. The subject is Telemachus being knighted by Minerva in some gardens, the name of which escapes me. In short, where the Roman ladies repaired on one single night. What shall I say to you? I have Romans, and Roman ladies [here occurs an illegible word], and the whole train. Madam Magloire has cleaned it all off; this summer she is going to have some small injuries repaired, and the whole revarnished, and my chamber will be a regular museum. She has also found in a corner of the attic two wooden pier-tables of ancient fashion. They asked us two crowns of six francs each to regild them, but it is much better to give the money to the poor; and they are very ugly besides, and I should much prefer a round table of mahogany.
The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.
A revolution is a rising of all the people.... But here what have we? Nothing but a handful of poor fools deceived by Lenin and Trotzky.... Their decrees and their appeals will simply add to the museum of historical curiosities....
"Certainly, sir," said Baker, who had risen and tucked his newly gained property under his arm. "There are a few of us who frequent the Alpha Inn, near the Museum--we are to be found in the Museum itself during the day, you understand. This year our good host, Windigate by name, instituted a goose club, by which, on consideration of some few pence every week, we were each to receive a bird at Christmas. My pence were duly paid, and the rest is familiar to you. I am much indebted to you, sir, for a Scotch bonnet is fitted neither to my years nor my gravity." With a comical pomposity of manner he bowed solemnly to both of us and strode off upon his way.
The interval between that time and supper Wemmick devoted to showing me his collection of curiosities. They were mostly of a felonious character; comprising the pen with which a celebrated forgery had been committed, a distinguished razor or two, some locks of hair, and several manuscript confessions written under condemnation,--upon which Mr. Wemmick set particular value as being, to use his own words, "every one of 'em Lies, sir." These were agreeably dispersed among small specimens of china and glass, various neat trifles made by the proprietor of the museum, and some tobacco-stoppers carved by the Aged. They were all displayed in that chamber of the Castle into which I had been first inducted, and which served, not only as the general sitting-room but as the kitchen too, if I might judge from a saucepan on the hob, and a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a roasting-jack.
"French dresses, French ideas, French feelings! There now, you turned Metivier out by the scruff of his neck because he is a Frenchman and a scoundrel, but our ladies crawl after him on their knees. I went to a party last night, and there out of five ladies three were Roman Catholics and had the Pope's indulgence for doing woolwork on Sundays. And they themselves sit there nearly naked, like the signboards at our Public Baths if I may say so. Ah, when one looks at our young people, Prince, one would like to take Peter the Great's old cudgel out of the museum and belabor them in the Russian way till all the nonsense jumps out of them."
The toiling masses of the people--the workmen, the peasants, the soldiers--are thirsting for elementary and advanced instruction. But they are also thirsting for education. Neither the government nor the intellectuals nor any other power outside of themselves can give it to them. The school, the book, the theatre, the museum, etc., may here by only aids. They have their own ideas, formed by their social position, so different from the position of those ruling classes and intellectuals who have hitherto created culture. They have their own ideas, their own emotions, their own ways of approaching the problems of personality and society. The city labourer, according to his own fashion, the rural toiler according to his, will each build his clear world-conception permeated with the class-idea of the workers. There is no more superb or beautiful phenomenon than the one of which our nearest descendants will be both witnesses and participants: The building by collective Labour of its own general, rich and free soul.
These admeasurements I now propose to set before you. But first, be it recorded, that, in this matter, I am not free to utter any fancied measurement I please. Because there are skeleton authorities you can refer to, to test my accuracy. There is a Leviathanic Museum, they tell me, in Hull, England, one of the whaling ports of that country, where they have some fine specimens of fin-backs and other whales. Likewise, I have heard that in the museum of Manchester, in New Hampshire, they have what the proprietors call "the only perfect specimen of a Greenland or River Whale in the United States." Moreover, at a place in Yorkshire, England, Burton Constable by name, a certain Sir Clifford Constable has in his possession the skeleton of a Sperm Whale, but of moderate size, by no means of the full-grown magnitude of my friend King Tranquo's.
Christmas of the year 1823 was particularly brilliant at Montfermeil. The beginning of the winter had been mild; there had been neither snow nor frost up to that time. Some mountebanks from Paris had obtained permission of the mayor to erect their booths in the principal street of the village, and a band of itinerant merchants, under protection of the same tolerance, had constructed their stalls on the Church Square, and even extended them into Boulanger Alley, where, as the reader will perhaps remember, the Thenardiers' hostelry was situated. These people filled the inns and drinking-shops, and communicated to that tranquil little district a noisy and joyous life. In order to play the part of a faithful historian, we ought even to add that, among the curiosities displayed in the square, there was a menagerie, in which frightful clowns, clad in rags and coming no one knew whence, exhibited to the peasants of Montfermeil in 1823 one of those horrible Brazilian vultures, such as our Royal Museum did not possess until 1845, and which have a tricolored cockade for an eye. I believe that naturalists call this bird Caracara Polyborus; it belongs to the order of the Apicides, and to the family of the vultures. Some good old Bonapartist soldiers, who had retired to the village, went to see this creature with great devotion. The mountebanks gave out that the tricolored cockade was a unique phenomenon made by God expressly for their menagerie.
To this centre, Wellington added one of Chasse's brigades taken from the right wing, and one of Wincke's brigades taken from the left wing, plus Clinton's division. To his English, to the regiments of Halkett, to the brigades of Mitchell, to the guards of Maitland, he gave as reinforcements and aids, the infantry of Brunswick, Nassau's contingent, Kielmansegg's Hanoverians, and Ompteda's Germans. This placed twenty-six battalions under his hand. The right wing, as Charras says, was thrown back on the centre. An enormous battery was masked by sacks of earth at the spot where there now stands what is called the "Museum of Waterloo." Besides this, Wellington had, behind a rise in the ground, Somerset's Dragoon Guards, fourteen hundred horse strong. It was the remaining half of the justly celebrated English cavalry. Ponsonby destroyed, Somerset remained.
A selection of Gillray's works appeared in parts in 1818; but the first good edition was Thomas M'Lean's, which was published, with a key, in 1830. A somewhat bitter attack, not only on Gillray's character, but even on his genius, appeared in the _Athenaeum_ for October 1, 1831, which was successfully refuted by J. Landseer in the _Athenaeum_ a fortnight later. In 1851 Henry G. Bohn put out an edition, from the original plates, in a handsome folio, the coarser sketches being published in a separate volume. For this edition Thomas Wright and R. H. Evans wrote a valuable commentary, which is a good history of the times embraced by the caricatures. The next edition, entitled _The Works of James Gillray, the Caricaturist: with the Story of his Life and Times_ (Chatto & Windus, 1874), was the work of Thomas Wright, and, by its popular exposition and narrative, introduced Gillray to a very large circle formerly ignorant of him. This edition, which is complete in one volume, contains two portraits of Gillray, and upwards of 400 illustrations. Mr J. J. Cartwright, in a letter to the _Academy_ (Feb. 28, 1874), drew attention to the existence of a MS. volume, in the British Museum, containing letters to and from Gillray, and other illustrative documents. The extracts he gave were used in a valuable article in the _Quarterly Review_ for April 1874. See also the _Academy_ for Feb. 21 and May 16, 1874. Entry: A
CAT'S-EYE, a name given to several distinct minerals, their common characteristic being that when cut with a convex surface they display a luminous band, like that seen by reflection in the eye of a cat. (1) Precious cat's-eye, oriental cat's-eye or chrysoberyl cat's-eye. This, the rarest of all, is a chatoyant variety of chrysoberyl (q.v.), showing in the finest stones a very sharply defined line of light. One of the grandest known specimens was in the Hope collection of precious stones, exhibited for many years at the Victoria and Albert Museum. (2) Quartz cat's-eye. This is the common form of cat's-eye, in which the effect is due to the inclusion of parallel fibres of asbestos. Like the chrysoberyl, it is obtained chiefly from Ceylon, but though coming from the East it is often called "occidental cat's-eye"--a term intended simply to distinguish it from the finer or "oriental" stone. It is readily distinguished by its inferior density, its specific gravity being only 2.65, whilst that of oriental cat's-eye is as high as 3.7. A greenish fibrous quartz, cut as cat's-eye, occurs at Hof and some other localities irr Bavaria. (3) Crocidolite cat's-eye, a beautiful golden brown mineral, with silky fibres, found in Griqualand West, and much used in recent years as an ornamental stone, sometimes under the name of "South African cat's-eye." It consists of fibrous quartz, coloured with oxide of iron, and results from the alteration of crocidolite (q.v.). It is often distinguished as "tiger's-eye" (or more commonly "tiger-eye"), whilst a blue variety, less altered, is known as "hawk's-eye." By the action of hydrochloric acid the colour of tiger's-eye may to a large extent be removed, and a greyish cat's-eye obtained. (4) Corundum cat's-eye. In some asteriated corundum (see ASTERIA) the star is imperfect and may be reduced to a luminous zone, producing an indistinct cat's-eye effect. According to the colour of the corundum the stone is known as sapphire cat's-eye, ruby cat's-eye, topaz cat's-eye, &c. (F. W. R.*) Entry: CAT
The Greek jewelry of the best period is of extraordinary delicacy and beauty. Fine examples are shown in the British Museum from Melos and elsewhere. Undoubtedly, however, the most brilliant collection of such ornaments is that of the Hermitage, which was derived from the tombs of Kerch and the Crimea. It contains examples of the purest Greek work, together with objects which must have been of local origin, as is shown by the themes which the artist has chosen for his reliefs. Fig. 18 illustrates the jewelry of the Hermitage Entry: ROMAN
There is a very fine specimen of the so-called clavicytherium (upright spinet) in the Donaldson museum of the Royal College of Music, London, acquired from the Correr collection at Venice in 1885.[4] The instrument is undated, but A.J. Hipkins[5] placed it early in the 16th or even at the end of the 15th century. There is German writing on the inside of the back, referring to some agreement at Ulm. The case is of pine-wood, and the natural keys of box-wood. The jacks have the early steel springs, and in 1885 traces were found in the instrument of original brass plectra, all of which point to a very early date. Entry: CLAVICYTHERIUM
Everything was carried out on the grand scale, and once again the influence of Sèvres became paramount in Europe, and its styles of painting and decoration were eagerly followed from 1830 to 1870 by all those European potters who were attempting to make anything beyond useful domestic wares. As an instance of its aims in the period between 1830 and 1850, large sums were spent in the production of great slabs of porcelain many feet in area; on which were painted copies of some of the famous portraits and other pictorial masterpieces in the galleries of the Louvre. A number of these are preserved in the museum at Sèvres, and must always excite admiration and even wonder at their technical accomplishment. Entry: POTTERY
EKATERINODAR, a town of South Russia, chief town of the province of Kubañ, on the right bank of the river Kubañ, 85 m. E.N.E. of Novo-rossiysk on the railway to Rostov-on-Don, and in 45° 3' N. and 38° 50' E. It is badly built, on a swampy site exposed to the inundations of the river; and its houses, with few exceptions, are slight structures of wood and plaster. Founded by Catherine II. in 1794 on the site of an old town called Tmutarakan, as a small fort and Cossack settlement, its population grew from 9620 in 1860 to 65,697 in 1897. It has various technical schools, an experimental fruit-farm, a military hospital, and a natural history museum. A considerable trade is carried on, especially in cereals. Entry: EKATERINODAR
With the awakening of interest in industrial art--sharply separated by pedantic classification from fine art--which began in England about the middle of the 19th century, schools of design were established which included more varied studies. Even as early as 1836 a government grant was made towards the opening of public galleries and the establishment of a normal school of design with a museum and lectures, and in 1837 the first school of design was opened at Somerset House. In 1840 grants were made to establish schools of the same kind in provincial towns, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds and Paisley. The names of G. Wallis in 1847, and Ambrose Poynter in 1850, are associated with schemes of art instruction adopted in the government art schools, and the year 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, was also marked by the first public exhibition of students' works, and the first institution of prizes and scholarships. In 1852 "the Department of Practical Art" was constituted, and a museum of objects collected at Marlborough House which afterwards formed the nucleus of the future museum at South Kensington. In 1853 "the Department of Science and Art" was established, and in 1857, under the auspices of Henry Cole, the offices of the department and the National Art Training School were removed from Marlborough House to South Kensington. Classes for instruction in various crafts had been carried on both at Somerset House and Marlborough House, and the whole object of the government schools of design was to give an artistic training to the designer and craftsman, so that he could carry back to his trade or craft improved taste and skill. The schools, however, became largely filled by students of another type--leisured amateurs who sought to acquire some artistic accomplishment, and even in the case of genuine designers and craftsmen who developed pictorial skill in their studies, the attraction and superior social distinction and possibility of superior commercial value accruing to the career of a painter of easel pictures diverted the schools from their original purpose. Entry: ART
HYPAETHROS (Gr. [Greek: hypaithros], beneath the sky, in the open air, [Greek: hypo], beneath, and [Greek: aithêr], air), the Greek term quoted by Vitruvius (iii. 2) for the opening in the middle of the roof of decastyle temples, of which "there was no example in Rome, but one in Athens in the temple of Jupiter Olympius, which is octastyle." But at the time he wrote (c. 25 B.C.) the cella of this temple was unroofed, because the columns which had been provided to carry, at all events, part of the ceiling and roof had been taken away by Sulla in 80 B.C. The decastyle temple of Apollo Didymaeus near Miletus was, according to Strabo (c. 50 B.C.), unroofed, on account of the vastness of its cella, in which precious groves of laurel bushes were planted. Apart from these two examples, the references in various writers to an opening of some kind in the roofs of temples dedicated to particular deities, and the statement of Vitruvius, which was doubtless based on the writings of Greek authors, that in decastyle or large temples the centre was open to the sky and without a roof (_medium autem sub divo est sine tecto_), render the existence of the hypaethros probable in some cases; and therefore C. R. Cockerell's discovery in the temple at Aegina of two fragments of a coping-stone, in which there were sinkings on one side to receive the tiles and covering tiles, has been of great importance in the discussion of this subject. In the conjectural restoration of the opaion or opening in the roof shown in Cockerell's drawing, it has been made needlessly large, having an area of about one quarter of the superficial area of the cella between the columns, and since in the Pantheon at Rome the relative proportions of the central opening in the dome and the area of the Rotunda are 1: 22, and the light there is ample, in the clearer atmosphere of Greece it might have been less. The larger the opening the more conspicuous would be the notch in the roof which is so greatly objected to; in this respect T. J. Hittorff would seem to be nearer the truth when, in his conjectural restoration of Temple R. at Selinus, he shows an opaion about half the relative size shown in Cockerell's of that at Aegina, the coping on the side elevation being much less noticeable. The problem was apparently solved in another way at Bassae, where, in the excavations of the temple of Apollo by Cockerell and Baron Haller von Hallerstein, three marble tiles were found with pierced openings in them about 18 in. by 10 in.; five of these pierced tiles on either side would have amply lighted the interior of the cella, and the amount of rain passing through (a serious element to be considered in a country where torrential rains occasionally fall) would not be very great or more than could be retained to dry up in the cella sunk pavement. In favour of both these methods of lighting the interior of the cella, the sarcophagus tomb at Cyrene, about 20 ft. long, carved in imitation of a temple, has been adduced, because, on the top of the roof and in its centre, there is a raised coping, and a similar feature is found on a tomb found near Delos; an example from Crete now in the British Museum shows a pierced tile on each side of the roof, and a large number of pierced tiles have been found in Pompeii, some of them surrounded with a rim identical with that of the marble tiles at Bassae. On the other hand, there are many authorities, among them Dr W. Dörpfeld, who have adhered to their original opinion that it was only through the open doorway that light was ever admitted into the cella, and with the clear atmosphere of Greece and the reflections from the marble pavement such lighting would be quite sufficient. There remains still another source of light to be considered, that passing through the Parian marble tiles of the roof; the superior translucency of Parian to any other marble may have suggested its employment for the roofs of temples, and if, in the framed ceilings carried over the cella, openings were left, some light from the Parian tile roof might have been obtained. It is possibly to this that Plutarch refers when describing the ceiling and roof of the temple of Demeter at Eleusis, where the columns in the interior of the temple carried a ceiling, probably constructed of timbers crossing one another at right angles, and one or more of the spaces was left open, which Xenocles surmounted by a roof formed of tiles. Entry: HYPAETHROS