[NHCOLL-L:3225] From the Chronicle of Higher Education -- Natural History Museums

[Jane MacKnight]

I'm not a subscriber, so I cannot provide the entire article but it's worth tracking down from the October 9, 2006 issue.  A university colleague provided a hard copy to me and it speaks to why I and probably others am drawn to natural history museums.

Here's what available without subscription!

Jane MacKnight
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Cincinnati Museum Center
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AN ACADEMIC IN AMERICA 
The Decline of the Natural-History Museum
An English professor who would have been a scientist, but for physics, laments the push-button, plush-toy mentality of today's museums
By THOMAS H. BENTON
Sometimes I wonder whether I have chosen the wrong profession.
How many English professors, after all, have a 6-foot-long reproduction of Rudolph Zallinger's The Age of Reptiles mural from Yale's Peabody Museum hanging in their home office above cabinets full of fossils, butterflies, and seashells?
As a child, I was, like many kids, fascinated by dinosaurs. One of my most powerful early memories is of visiting the great hall of Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences: an enormous 19th-century gallery decorated, as I recall, with wrought iron, entablatures, oak, and marble. I remember my footsteps echoing as I walked toward the polished railing behind which stood the Hadrosaurus, more than 20 feet tall and impossibly ancient. The mounted skeleton - brown, lacquered, and crackled, like a Rembrandt painting - revealed itself gradually as my eyes adjusted to the light.
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