the Renascence, when its fragments
were recovered, and soon did more harm than good to the
fetish-worshipping peoples of Europe.

* * * * *

The first use of the word "museum" in this country for a place in
which collections of ancient works of art and specimens of natural
history were stored and arranged for exhibition was in the early
eighteenth century, when it was applied to the building at Oxford,
erected for Mr. Ashmole's collections, presented to the University.
This was called "Ashmole's Museum," or the Ashmolean Museum.
Previously such a collection and its location were spoken of as "a
cabinet of rare and curious objects." "Museum" was occasionally used
for what we now call a "study," and even to describe lecture-rooms and
library. I have not been able to discover that the word was used in
its modern sense at an earlier date on the Continent than in England.
The first great typical example of a "museum" was the British Museum,
founded in 1753. Montagu House, in Bloomsbury, was purchased by the
State to serve as a "repository" (the word used in the Act of
Parliament of that date) for the vast collections of natural history
made by Sir Hans Sloane, with which were associated certain valuable
libraries and collections of manuscripts, of coins, and antique
marbles. A large part of the money required for the undertaking was
raised by a public lottery, over which the Archbishop of Canterbury,
the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker presided (according to the custom
of those days in regard to State lotteries), and it is thus that this
remarkable group of great officials became, and have remained ever
since, "the Three Principal Trustees of the British Museum."
Additional trustees were named (since increased to a total of nearly
fifty), and provision was made for the appointment of a principal
librarian and other curators of the collections. The Act declared that
the collections placed in the "repository" (Montagu House) were to
remain there for the benefit and enjoyment of posterity for ever--a
provision which until seven years ago was misinterpreted, so as to
prevent the sending out of unnamed and unstudied collections of small
portable objects like insects, dried plants, and shells, to be named
and compared with other specimens, by foreign naturalists.
Consequently, there was a great accumulation of specimens unstudied
and useless, and a great loss to knowledge. But the late Lord
Chan