USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > Discovery and conquests of the Northwest, with the history of Chicago, Vol. II > Part 16
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The third of these special collections presents an exhibit of the metallurgy of the precious and base metals, comprising separate monographic exhibits of
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each of the metals of economic importance, illustrating the progress of the metal from the ore as it left the mine to the production of various manufactured articles from the simple metal and from its various alloys.
The steps represented were:
First. - Concentration samples, or mine metallurgy, showing the ores after the various steps of stamping, milling, separating, etc.
Second .- Reduction samples, showing the transfor- mations produced by chemical processes, by roasting, smelting, etc.
Third .- Application samples, showing the combina- tion of metals in alloys adapted to various uses in the arts.
Fourth .- Samples showing the results of test treat- ments, made to determine malleability or ductility or power to resist, tension, compression, torsion, etc., required to meet the severe demands of modern engi- neering.
The scheme was completed by a collection of dia- grams of metallurgical processes, and of pictures and models of the appliances in actual use. The collections were both contributed and loaned, and most of the owners of private exhibits cordially donated their material to the museum.
Mention should also be made of the iron and steel exhibit from the German section, of Stumm Bros, and of the very elaborate and complete exhibit of petro- leum and its products made by the Standard Oil Co., of New York.
In the department of anthropology had been col- lected extensive exhibits illustrative of the archæo- logy and ethnology of America, the work of the chief, Prof. Frederick W. Putnam, of Harvard university, and a large corps of assistants, conducted with energy for two or three years. The exhibit was originally planned by Professor Putnam with the purpose of assembling from the American field-one of exceptional
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richness-a vast number of anthropological objects representing its aboriginal American peoples. He had in mind, also, the value such collections would have for permanent exhibition, and this, no doubt, furnished the inspiration which led him to hope that a great anthropological museum might be established ulti- mately in Chicago.
Special collections were made for this department, under the direction of Professor Putnam, by com- missions sent out for the purpose, or by collectors resident in the field. Agents were sent to the Orinoco river, to Ecuador, Bolivia, Chili, Peru, Paraguay and other South American countries. An important series of casts of Central American ruins was obtained. Ethnological material was sought in Mexico and Southern California, and from the rich fields of Alaska. The tribes of Indians living within the territory of the United States and Canada furnished a large quota of much value. The rich treasures left by the, so called, mound builders in Hopewell, Ohio, were opened, under the direction of the department, especially for the Ex- position, and were supplemented by others from New Jersey, Michigan and Ohio.
The department of transportation exhibits was planned with a view of showing, not only the most approved methods of transportation in use at the present time, but also the gradual steps by which the present high degree of perfection has been attained.
A light two-wheeled vehicle, believed to be a Scythian racing chariot, was exhumed from an Egyptian mummy pit, and is now in a Florentine museum. The perfection of its workmanship is remarkable, and cer- tainly indicates that the historical accounts of ancient vehicles are not overdrawn. In the museum of the New York Historical Society there is also an Egyptian wheel. With these exceptions, no known relics are in existence. An exact replica of the first was made in Florence, and is now in the Field Columbian Museum. From the
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same place came, also, a copy of a child's toy boat, found in an Etruscan tomb. Since the close of the Exposi- tion a boat sufficiently large for the conveyance of merchandise, in use on the Nile four and a half centu- ries before the beginning of the Christian era, has been exhumed from an Egyptian tomb above the pyramids some distance from the river, and is now one of the most ancient and most cherished exhibits in the Field Columbian Museum.
The examples named are, it is believed, the only remains known of ancient vehicles. The museums of the world contain, however, numerous specimens of ancient and mediaval bits, spurs, etc., exhumed from tombs or found on battle fields, some of which were loaned to the Exposition, but could not be retained for the museum.
Among the most interesting of existing rude forms of transportation were those of the American continent. From Alaska came canoes, dog sleds, etc .; from South America, canoes, donkeys, llamas, sedans and pack out- fits for men and beasts ; from Mexico, rude carts, mule litters, saddlery, etc .; from Brazil, aboriginal canoes, rafts and jangadas. A valuable collection of various water craft, sedan chairs, palanquins and models illus- trating transportation was made through the agency of consuls on duty in all parts of the world. Foreign governments also contributed liberally to this phase of the Exposition.
The railway division of this department was entirely novel and without precedent. Covering as it did a period of scarcely a century, it nevertheless presented many phases of the development of this form of trans- portation which have already passed into oblivion, and are to the public of to-day no better known than if they had existed in the reigns of the Pharaohs. The exhibit was skillfully planned and thoroughly worked out at very considerable cost. It was undertaken in time to save many valuable relics which soon would have disap-
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peared. Here could be traced the successive steps in the development of the permanent way, from a tram- way of rough stones to a perfectly graded, ballasted and ironed continuous railway track ; the growth of the locomotive, beginning with a sealed copper kettle and culminating in machines of the swiftest and strongest ; most of the intermediate steps having been redeemed from the scrap yards of the older railway corporations ; and the growth of the railway vehicle, from a simple box, that would carry a dozen passengers, to the pala- tial Pullman of latest elegance; cars for carrying cattle, horses and fowls ; for climbing mountains, for working in forests and mines ; tank cars for oil ; mail cars; refrigerator cars for fruits and fresh meats; express cars and baggage cars. There were automatic brakes, pneumatic gates, electric block signals; there were time cards, tariff lists, way-bills, tickets and passes.
The department of art left few indices of its own suc- cess with the Field Columbian Museum, for the reason that the plans of the museum did not provide for development in that direction, and because what of art did remain found a more fitting home at the Art Insti- tute, an organization which had already outgrown its adolescence, before the building of the Exposition, and which in various ways enjoyed timely and substantial assistance from that enterprise.
In the decoration of its stately edifices the builders of the Exposition used freely sculpture, as well as archi- tectural design. All the great buildings were adorned with many original and beautiful objects in every phase of plastic art. Every pinnacle and coign of vantage bore its nymph or its hero, its guardian angel or its group of sirens or Solons. Many of the statues were of gigantic proportions, made so purposely because they were to occupy lofty positions at a distance from the eye of the observer, and because it was needful that they conform to the grand scale of the buildings they adorned. Some of the Exposition statuary was removed
THE COLUMBIAN ROTUNDA.
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to other places. Most of the pieces perished in the final conflagration.
A considerable number of the pieces were repro- duced in dimensions suited to near observation, and these are gathered in the central rotunda of the museum build- ing. Although not cast in bronze nor cut in enduring marble, but molded in perishable plaster, these statues deserve to be carefully preserved, being all that remains to illustrate the exuberant plastic art of the great Exposition. They include the Columbus by St. Gaudens and his pupil; the Republic by French; figures by Bitter, Martiny, Kraus and Waagen, and animals by Kemys, French and Potter.
The contents of a great museum arrange themselves in distinctly recognized groups, which are, neverthe- less, differentiated with difficulty, and often overlap each other, just as the kingdoms of nature constantly interlace. A single criterion divides the aggregation into two realms. In one we decipher the history of nature; in the other is written the history of man. In the one we deal with a series of natural reactions. The relations of cause and effect are multifarious, yet relatively simple, and everywhere uniform. In the other realm a series of relations appears, but infinitely more difficult of apprehension, because complicated by motives, impulses and ideas not subservient to laws of like simplicity and uniformity. The laws of nature never vary; those of human actions are infinitely vari- ant and divergent. Water became solid and then fluid in the remotest geologic ages just as it does to-day. The bee's cell always conforms to a constant formula. Men's dwellings, ships and locomotives vary infinitely. They who refer to science as if restricted to a dis- cussion of natural phenomena err greatly; a subtler and more profound scientia discusses the more infin- itely varied phenomena of human activities.
The fullest conception of a grand museum includes both phases of these contrasted ideals. The bronzes
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from Pompeii, the collections of ceramic products, the statuary which perpetuates the glories of the Court of Honor, the Columbian relics, all belong on the historic side. Their proper study involves the highest science.
The familiar subdivision of nature's products as mineral, vegetable and animal, serves to indicate to the popular view the principal divisions of that side of the museum which illustrates natural history in the departments of mineralogy, geology, botany, palæon- tology, zoology and anthropology. In each of these departments the museum authorities have caused foun- dations to be laid with a broadly liberal and apprecia- tive care. The collections illustrate the facts concern- ing the form of the earth's crust and the objects found therein; the vegetables which thrive upon its surface, and the animals that live, directly or mediately, upon the vegetation.
Mention has been made of the collections in the department of mineralogy, illustrative of its economic side, in decorative and building stones, coals, petrol- eums and metallic ores. The decorative stones, marble, verde antique, alabaster and onyx represent many no- table European quarries. They are cut in slabs and polished. Four-inch cubes, variously wrought and sub- jected to the most strenuous practical tests, represent the best known quarries of building stones in the United States. The petroleums include samples from every oil well in the United States, with the sands from which they are drawn, accompanied with data graphi- cally shown, and illustrations of the processes and products of refinement.
A remarkably complete collection of gems and pre- cious stones, installed in Higinbotham hall, contains specimens of nearly every known variety, in crystals, cleavages or rolled grains, and in the finest cut exam- ples. Many of the objects are of world wide repute and of historical interest, diamonds, sapphires, aqua marines, topazes, etc. The examples of quartz and
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quartz cutting are not surpassed, and are accompanied with cut amethysts, opals and moonstones. There is a collection of cameos and intaglios, fine examples of the glyptic art, many of them cut as long ago as the year 500 A. D. Among the stones used are red jasper, carnelian, onyx, chalcedony, sardonyx and smoky quartz.
Installed with the gems, and worthy of note in the same connection, is the very complete Tiffany collec- tion of India jewelry. Many of the pieces are very old, representing the jeweler's handicraft as practiced in India for more than 2,000 years, and adapted to be worn upon various parts of the human body. This col- lection contains :
First .- Objects made from unalloyed gold, set with precious stones, and embellished with richly colored enamels. These jewels were worn by the higher caste only.
Second. - Silver jewels, finely wrought, worn by the lower castes.
Third .- Base metal jewelry, worn by the lowest castes.
The precious and economic metals are illustrated, from the forms in which they occur in nature, whether as native metals or as mineral ores, tractable or re- fractory, through all the processes by which the metals are reduced and prepared for economic uses. The illus- trations include models of the mills for the preparation of ores, smelters for their reduction and machinery for their further manufacture.
Non-metallic minerals and fictile materials are rep- resented with equal thoroughness.
The purely scientific side of science has not been neglected, the subdivisions being marked by notable examples, crystalline and amorphous, accompanied with carefully compiled statements of their crystallo- graphic and chemical relations. The section of lithol- ogy contains more than 15,000 specimens of the stand-
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ard size, 4x3x1 inch, supplemented with a large num- ber of polished slabs.
The museum contains one of the fullest American collections of those substances of extra-tellurian origin known as aerolites, aerosiderites, etc., gathered by the earth from the unreckoned myriads of like substances traversing the intersidereal spaces.
The sections of structural and dynamic geology demonstrate by diagrams and models the processes of upheaval, depression and erosion, shaping the contours of the lands and the outlines of the seas, as those pro- cesses are now operating and have wrought in the suc- cessive periods of the world's geologic history.
The department of botany is one of the foremost in the museum, both as to the magnitude of its collections and the thoroughness of its organization. It occupies the whole of the wide galleries and the numerous alcoves surrounding the four main courts and the rotunda of the building. For light and convenience of arrange- ment the conditions could hardly be improved.
As has been already shown, the foundation of this department was the immense mass of valuable material inherited from the World's Columbian Exposition. The same cause determined, largely, the character of the collections. Gathered as they were for public display, the contributions from each field were chosen to attract and hold the attention of a lay observer rather than of one versed in the intricacies of botanical science. Hence the more than usual prominence given to ex- hibits of an economic and practical character. Hence the showing of forestry and its products, of fibers and their uses; of agricultural staples, as cotton, tobacco, hemp and all cereal grains; of teas, coffees, spices, gums, resins, oils, tan barks, dye stuffs and other things, familiar or rare; the product of field and forest, of orchard and grove.
After the mineral, the vegetable; after the veg- etable, the animal. The sequence began in the deep seas,
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while the continents were yet islands. The earth is one vast sepulchre. The rocks are full of the remains of plants and animals, of which even the races were long since extinct. The student of organic life must seek his earlier data in that ancient library, whose volumes, locked in the rocks, he must learn first to open, then to decipher. Of some volumes the editions are so large that any museum, even any private collector, may secure a representation, as of trilobites or crinoids, fishes or fern leaves, limited in volume only by the capacity of his cases. Of other forms originals are unique ; and as only now and then a library may pos- sess an original Dante or Milton, so only a single museum may enjoy a glyptodon or a dinotherium, while the others must be content with casts. Of both originals and casts the Field Columbian Museum has a collection arranged stratigraphically, in which the student may read, as from a book, an account of the progressive characteristics of life, from the earliest geological eras ; for the realms of palæontology and of zoology are separated by no broader line than that which divides yesterday from to-day. The bull which was mired in a swamp, last week, is as certainly a geolog- ical object as is the mastodon, mired in the same swamp, perhaps a thousand years ago; or the titano- therium which perished many thousand years before that, perhaps in a similar manner.
The plan of the arrangement of the palæontology is, first, stratigraphical; second, biological, the fossils of each epoch being placed in accordance with their rank in the scale of being.
The departments of the museum which have received the largest accessions since its opening are those of zoology and anthropology. Usually, in each season several expeditions have been sent into the field for the collection of material, at the charge of the museum management, or of its wealthy friends, under the immediate supervision of some member of its staff.
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These excursions have varied in their range from the regions of the neighboring states to those as remote as Alaska and eastern Africa. Much valuable material has been secured in this way from Yucatan and Mexico; from the Indians in the mountain parts of the United States and upon the northwest coast, and from many nearer regions. The most important expedition, taking into account the time occupied, the distance traversed or the results secured, was that made to eastern and central Africa in the summer of 1896, by Prof. D. G. Elliot, curator of the department of zoology. Profes- sor Elliot entered Somali Land, in eastern Africa, from the coast, extended his search for large game far into the interior, and returned to the sea coast in the vicinity of Aden. The proceeds of the expedition were several hundred skins of large and rare mammals, of birds, reptiles, etc., with many skeletons, casts and other material of taxidermic value.
These specimens, with many others, have given opportunity of displaying species by groups, in which appear the young and adult of both sexes, mounted in the positions which they would naturally assume in their own homes, and surrounded by their usual acces- sories. As examples of such groups may be cited musk oxen, from the snows of northern Greenland; orang- utangs and proboscidean monkeys, playing and fight- ing amid tropical foliage; wild asses, oryxes, lesser koodoos, Walter's gazelles, and leopards, in African habitats; guanacos, from South America and panthers, from the Rocky mountain regions. Besides these groups there are typical specimens of nearly every family of animals known to science.
The group of ornithology is the only zoological group which has, thus far, been assigned to a special curator. The system of arrangement admits of the isolation of others whenever occasion may require. In this group, as in others, the outline of classification is well filled, while the accessions, constantly gathering, readily find
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their places. Among the birds, as among the mammals, a large beginning has been made in the preparation of what may be called monographic exhibits. As is well known, the plumage of some species of birds varies greatly, not only because of sex, but with age, season and habitat. A complete series, which it may take many patient years to acquire, will show these variations, together with the nest, often only a feeble apology for one, as found on the ground, in a bush, in the hollow of a tree or lost among the stones of a desert beach.
Anthropology, covering a wide field in the develop- ment of the human family, and furnishing a vast range of materials available for museum purposes, naturally became an important feature in the young museum. The founders were fortunate in securing at the outset extensive collections representing many widely separ- ated portions of the world.
The great group illustrating the carrying industries has already been referred to. Other exhibits illustrat- ing interests of special importance to civilized man, such as ceramics, textiles, leathers, jewelry, etc., have been gathered into a department of industries. In another direction, the fine arts, particularly painting and sculptures, might well be segregated. The indus- tries and the fine arts being thus separately provided for, there would remain a department to which should be referred whatever relates to the progressive move- ments of primitive peoples, through all the stages which brought them to the fuller light of a generous civilization.
The location of the museum, in proximity to the cen- ter of the North American continent, imposes upon it a peculiar obligation to take a prominent part in secur- ing from the tribes of red men, now rapidly disappear- ing, everything that can illustrate the history and the character of those indigenous races.
A brief enumeration will indicate the recognition of this obligation, and the steps taken in its fulfillment.
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Among the important collections which have a direct bearing upon the subject are the generous gift of Mr. Edward E. Ayer, illustrative of American ethnology, valued at $100,000, as already stated: houses, totem poles and utensils from the Haida Indians of Alaska; Eskimo material from North Greenland, Alaska and Eastern Siberia; casts of sculptured ruins in Yucatan; illustra- tions of the villages, homes and employments of the Zuni, Hopi and other dwellers upon the mesas in the arid regions of Arizona and vicinity; collections from the Hopewell mounds of Ohio, from New Jersey, the southern states and Canada; collections from Peru, Colombia, Paraguay and British Guiana.
Some of this vast array of valuable material was shown at the Columbian Exposition, some has since been added by gift, much has been gathered by the work ing staff of the museum in vacation and other ex- cursions. To the enumeration may be added casts of Chaldeo-Assyrian antiquities, originals from Egypt, ethnographic material from islands of the Pacific ocean, from all parts of eastern Asia and from Africa.
In this account of the museum much has been omit- ted, and all has been condensed. It is not possible to give more briefly an adequate conception of the magnificent enterprise which, at the outset, stepped into the front rank among the great museums of the world. Its scheme is ample. Its methods accord with the best museum practice. With its present and increasing facilities it will continue to confer inestimable benefits upon the citizens and, particularly, the youth of the metropolitan city of Chicago.
Science is served by the museum through the original work of its staff, performed upon its collections, and made known by its publications.
The general public is served by the museum through its collections, open constantly for study or amusement, by its popular lecture courses, and also by its publica- tions. The halls of the museum are open to the public
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AYER HALL-NORTH AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY.
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365 days in the year, on Saturdays and Sundays with- out charge. Many thousands of free tickets are issued each year to the children of the public schools of the city, through their superintendents, and teachers with their classes are always welcome. During the five years since the opening of the museum the average attendance has been more than 250,000 per annum.
During each season two or more courses of lectures, of six to ten lectures in each course, are given at the museum by members of the staff or other noted scien- tists, upon scientific subjects of popular interest, to crowded audiences, admitted without charge. The lec- tures are usually illustrated with transparencies pre- pared in the museum.
Publications are issued, not at stated periods, but whenever suitable material has been prepared by some of the staff. The museum maintains its own printing office. Forty-one papers have been printed and dis- tributed to the officers and members of the Association, and to other scientific and educational institutions. The issues are classified as follows :
Historical, two papers; geological, six papers; bo- tanical, four papers; zoological, fifteen papers; anthro- pological, five papers ; ornithological, two papers ; reports, four; miscellaneous, three.
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