Science: Crippled Museum

With William Beebe flashing romantic reports of the Sargasso Sea and Galapagos, and Roy Chapman Andrews cabling accounts of antediluvian exhumations in Mongolia, the American Museum of Natural History (New York City) was never more widely advertised than last year. There was the Scopes trial in Tennessee, which sent thousands of news-following New Yorkers and out-of-town visitors to stand at gaze before the evolutionary figures in the famed hall of the Age of Man. The Museum had 142,047 more visitors than in any previous year, 1,775,890 in all. Its subscribing membership increased by 1,055 to a total of 8,519. Its educational program reached 5,400,000 school children.

But public interest is not always accompanied by commensurate public financial support. The Museum received $400,000 in cash and specimens last year from benefactors, which was more than in any prior year. Yet in making his annual report of the Museum’s affairs last week, President Henry Fairfield Osborn* was obliged to tell the trustees that the institution was financially crippled.

He said that an endowment of four millions would be necessary to conduct work on the present basis. Half a million annually would have to be forthcoming from New York City for education and maintenance ($369,737 came forth in 1925). Ten millions would be necessary to keep ahead of costs and insure expansion. Already some field work had perforce been abandoned; reports of costly expeditions had not been printed; endowment income had had to be diverted from scientific ends to meet salaries, rent; the trustees had had to contribute $51,000 to balance the books without a deficit. New collections, though given, require new attendants to care for them. Gifts of land from New York City require building funds. Privately-financed expeditions bring new throngs of spectators, letter-writers, question-askers to be cared for.

Would the American Museum find enough funds for 1926 to keep abreast of Washington’s Smithsonian Institution and Chicago’s Field Museum? The public hoped so, and scanning the museum’s list of re-elections, guessed so. The list:

Henry Fairfield Osborn, President, 18th year.

George F. Baker, Vice President, 3rd year.

John Pierpont Morgan, Vice President, 15th year.

George F. Baker Jr., Treasurer, 5th year.

Percy R. Pyne, Secretary, 6th year.

* Born at Fairfield, Conn., in 1857, Henry Fairfield Osborn was graduated in 1877 from the College of New Jersey (which became Princeton University in 1896). He accompanied Princeton explorations in the Far West, studied anatomy and histology in Manhattan, biology in Britain with Balfour and Huxley (meeting Darwin there), taught at Princeton until 1890, when he was chosen curator of vertebrate paleontology by the Museum he now heads. He has prosecuted extensive fossil explorations for the Museum, discovering and identifying many lost species (especially reptiles and pachyderms), and building up the largest collection of vertebrate fossils in the world. Among his best known books are From the Greeks to Darwin (1894) and The Earth Speaks to Bryan (1925).