4. The fourth direction of development is toward the requirements of a National University, which has already been sufficiently dwelt upon in this connection.
Children's Museum.—The children gain a fair amount of information from the general exhibit in any well-arranged museum, but it is desirable that their interest should be aroused by having certain exhibits made expressly for them. I would have a space set aside in each of the three departments in which nothing should be exhibited except for the children. It might be called a Museum Kindergarten.
Some of the preceding suggestions have been adopted by the museum authorities and partially put into execution, and the carrying of them out is dependent upon enlarged facilities for laboratory work and exhibition space. During the administration of Dr. Goode the museum developed as far as possible under the conditions surrounding it. No one knew better than he that only by securing new buildings and expanding the museum could it take the place in America that the several national museums of Europe have taken in their respective countries. It is well recognized that a public museum is a necessity in every highly civilized community, and that, as has been so well stated by Dr. Goode, "the degree of civilization which any nation, city, or province has attained is best shown by the character of its public museums and the liberality with which they are maintained." At present New York city is, in this respect, in advance of all other American cities and of the national Government. Whether the latter will take its proper place by developing the National Museum as it has developed the National Library remains to be seen. The question whether they are willing to be represented by the museum as it is to-day is one that the American people should consider and decide at an early date; meantime, it is the duty of all interested in the advancement of science and education to aid by every means in their power the development of a National Museum that will be truly national and American.
ARE JEWS JEWS?
By JOSEPH JACOBS,
PRESIDENT OF THE JEWISH HISTORICAL SOCIETY.
In the December (1898) and January (1899) numbers of Appletons' Popular Science Monthly Prof. William Z. Ripley concludes the remarkable series of articles on the Racial Geography of Europe, originally delivered as Lowell Institute lectures, by a couple of articles on the Jews. Strictly speaking, the articles might seem to have no right in the particular series in which Professor Ripley has included them, since their main object is to show that the Jews are not a race but a people, and have therefore no claim to be considered in the racial geography of any continent. But one can not regret that a daring disregard for logic has caused Professor Ripley to conclude his interesting series with the somewhat startling paradox that Jews are not Jews, in the sense of the word in which both their friends and their enemies have hitherto taken it. As Professor Ripley has been good enough to refer to me as having written with some authority on the subject, and as I have not been convinced by his arguments against the comparative racial purity of the Jews, I am glad of an opportunity to discuss the question, which is of equal theoretic and practical interest.
The theoretic interest, with which alone we need concern ourselves here, seems to me of two kinds. Professor Ripley, as a student of anthropology, declares, as the result of his inquiries, that there has been so large an admixture of round skulls with the (hypothetically assumed) original long skulls of the Hebrews that all signs of racial unity have disappeared. I, on the other hand, who have approached the subject as a student of history,[10] see no evidence of any such large admixture of alien elements in the race since its dispersion from Palestine, and have come, therefore, to the opposite conclusion—that the Jews now living are, to all intents and purposes, exclusively the direct descendants of the Diaspora. Here, then, anthropology and history—if Professor Ripley and I have respectively interpreted their verdicts aright—appear to speak in two opposite senses, and no conference at La Hague or elsewhere can appoint a court of appeal which can decide between contrary propositions by two different sciences.