r Jeffries Wyman. On the 3d of November,
1866, therefore, the arrangements were completed, and Mr. Peabody
delivered to a board of trustees one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
as an endowment. On the first of the following month Dr. Wyman began his
curatorship.

As yet, of course, there was no museum. As a nucleus, Professor Wyman
contributed some Indian implements and crania, the nooks and corners of
the college were ransacked for stray skulls, stone axes and arrow-heads,
pottery that had been ploughed up in the suburbs, and relics of
colonial days, all of which, when brought together, served to fill a few
empty cases in a room of Boylston Hall. Soon afterward, printed
circulars were issued, and gifts began to flow in from the neighborhood,
illustrating the life of the native races at and just before the time of
the Pilgrims' landing. Several societies in Boston made permanent
deposits of ethnological accumulations in the infant establishment; Mr.
E. G. Squier, the Peruvian explorer, sent a Peruvian mummy of great
value, with seventy-five crania, and promised larger gifts; the
Smithsonian Institution gave a lot of duplicates, many of which were
gathered by the great Wilkes Exploring Expedition; the Honorable Caleb
Cushing forwarded antiquities gathered by his command during the Mexican
war; and several famous collections were bought in Europe, illustrating
the stone and bronze ages. Thus public interest was stimulated, and even
at the end of the first year a very presentable sketch of a picture of
the aboriginal people of the world was to be seen in that small room in
Boylston Hall. It was accessible to any interested visitors, and began
to receive attention from the scientific world, particularly after the
first annual report appeared in January, 1868, containing an original
essay by the curator and a full statement of the growing importance of
the museum.

From this beginning the work went steadily on. Contributions from
private and public sources came without stint. The fund of the museum
available for explorations and the purchase of collections was
judiciously expended year by year, and each annual report contained news
of great interest to _savants_. The amount of material gathered speedily
outgrew its original quarters, and a new story was added to Boylston
Hall for the reception of the museum. At the end of seven years the
catalogue showed over eight thousand entries, one entry in many cases
covering a ser