Museum Ups & Downs

The science museums of the country entertained and instructed millions of visitors last year. Attendance at the leading institutions were:

Smithsonian, Washington 1,600.000

Field, Chicago 1,515,463

American, Manhattan 1,129,051

Peaceful Arts, Manhattan. . 114,000

Academy, Philadelphia.... 103,750

But the people who belong to museums as members and who finance activities were neither so numerous nor so interested as usual. Field Museum's membership was only 5,150; Academy of Natural Sciences 1,800; American Museum of Natural History 12,000.

Last week the American Museum's trustees held their annual meeting and faced the fact that they had only $1,372,761.85 to spend during 1932. An attempt to increase the museum's endowment fund (now $15,000,000) to $22,000,000 had broken down. Consequently the museum was obliged to recall the dozen exploring and collecting expeditions it has been partially supporting in many regions. The only large party which will continue work during this year is the Whitney South Sea Expedition for birds, under William F. Coultas, supported by the William Payne Whitney estate.

Included with the dozen abandoned expeditions is Dr. Roy Chapman Andrews' to Central Asia where he finds dinosaur eggs. The Chinese have refused to let him hunt more eggs and bones. He could reach the region by way of Russia and Siberia. But then he would be obliged to traffic with the Russians, a business which would displease the museum's supporters. So he will remain in Manhattan this winter and spring, writing up his past activities and warding off the verbal assaults of women explorers who, he declared last week, are fitted neither temperamentally nor physically to explore. He would not have more than one woman on any expedition.

The abandonment of expeditions throws specialists out of work. Noted Dr. Andrews last week: "There is the altogether personal problem of the technically trained man or the field worker who now finds his valuable services not at all valuable. He is certainly in the unemployed class, along with many others. It is indeed unfortunate that men who have spent a lifetime in scientific research now find themselves on the street without a job." One of the American Museum's staff who did not let the museum's comparative poverty stall him was Harold Elmer Anthony, curator of mammals. He and Gilbert Ottley found enough money to sail last week for a two-month trip to Venezuela, to hunt "everything that lives" for his department.

Another of the scientific staff to leave on a long journey last week was President Henry Fairfield Osborn. Next New Year's Day he will have completed 25 years as museum president, 41 as a curator. Then he will resign the presidency, remain perhaps as president-emeritus, perhaps as honorary curator-in-chief of fossil vertebrates.

The trip he started last week is a three-month world cruise arranged by Raymond-Whitcomb aboard the Norwegian Stella Polaris. Four dozen other Americans will be in the party. The ship, as it lay moored to a Brooklyn dock last week, contained 5,000 bottles of spirits, kegs of beer piled deck high, 55,000 bottles of vintage wine.

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