File:The American Museum journal (c1900-(1918)) (17537416744).jpg

Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo14amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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accessories are a matter of secondary importance, merely a setting. The first large group, the Bird Rock group, placed on exhibition in 1898, was not definitely planned as a habitat group, but merely as a picture of part of a famous and impressive bird colony and to make "a permanent record of this characteristic phase of island life." The Cobb's Island group was the next and the first real habitat group to be con- structed, this subject being chosen partly because it provided a large and interest- ing group at small expense. Year after year this series of groups has been extended, covering the country from east to west and north to south, until room is left for but one more and that, it is hoped, will include the bird life of the Arctic regions. The bullfrog and giant salamander groups, which are among the latest to be added to museum exhib- its, belong in still another category and may be termed synthetic, or life study groups, bringing together in one compos- ite picture a number of animals that probably would not be found in so small an area at any one moment of the season de- picted, but might all be found there at some moment of the season. Such a group may, or may not, represent a particular spot; it does depict the natural condi- tions under which, the animals are to be found and shows them engaged in the most characteristic and interesting of their varied occupations. In this, the day of moving pictures we may say that as the moving picture condenses into five minutes' time the events of days or weeks, so these groups depict in a few square feet of space the life and happenings of a much larger area. The group in its latest form is to be found in the Museum of the University of Kansas, where it includes a great part of the Museum, a special section having been constructed to contain a large cyclorama where the various North American animals from plain to moun- tain and from temperate to Arctic Amer- ica may be viewed approximately as they would be seen in nature.^ Somewhat similar is the Laysan Island group, executed for the State University of 1 This prepared by and under the direction of L.'L. Dyche, is an amplification of his ideas as shown in 1893 in the Kansas Building at the World's Fair. 61

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