end John Manton.

C. W. WILMERDING.

THE PEABODY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY.

In respect to her facility and opportunities for advancing the cause of
scientific knowledge, Harvard University certainly stands pre-eminent.
She has a splendid astronomical observatory, and laboratories for
chemistry and physics unexcelled elsewhere. Her botanical garden is the
only one for instruction of any consequence in the Union, and its
director, Asa Gray, is the chief of American botanists. In the Museum of
Comparative Zoology, founded by Louis Agassiz and sustained by his son,
Alexander Agassiz, Cambridge possesses the most productive, and in some
respects the completest, museum of animal life in the United States,
while it offers to the laboratory student of natural history advantages
which he can find equalled nowhere else in the whole world. Last, and
most modern, it has a museum of anthropology which in point of material
is rivalled only by the National Museum at Washington, and in point of
instructiveness is probably in advance of anything yet attained in the
United States, despite its youth and small resources. This school and
storehouse is the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology,
whose merits deserve a wider recognition than they have yet received.

When, in 1866, George Peabody, of philanthropic fame, was distributing
his bequests among the educational institutions of the Eastern States,
he was desirous of giving to Harvard a certain sum of money, but was
puzzled as to its proper application. It was suggested to him to endow a
department of archaeological research, and his proposition to that effect
was considered by several friends of the university. The institution had
peculiar needs at that time. Its finances generally were weak. The
library and the zoological museum especially needed money, and the idea
of a special department of prehistoric science was entirely new. It was
decided, however, not to attempt to influence Mr. Peabody away from his
own plan. President Walker saw that European minds were eagerly turning
toward studies of primitive man, that the interest in the subject would
grow from year to year, and that, as the first museum in the country
devoted to this branch, it would have the best chance for securing
collections rapidly going to destruction or distributed through private
cabinets. More than all, the fittest man to take charge of it was at
hand, in the person of Professo