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American Museum of Natural History

1932; Nature Portfolio; Volume: 129; Issue: 3245 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1038/129053a0

1476-4687

Species Distribution and Climate Change

THE standing and the progress of the American Museum of Natural History illustrate what can be attained by effort over a relatively limited field so long as public interest approves and lends its support. On the common ground of the great public educational purposes served by the museum, the City and State of New York have combined in granting appropriations for building alone of 16,000,000 dollars; and the increasing extent of the services rendered may be judged from the jump which is foreshadowed in annual expenditure, from the “inadequate sum” of 15,000,000 dollars in January 1931 to an amount of 22,500,000 dollars in 1933, when the building programme will be completed, and the exhibition halls, laboratories, and lecture halls will be in full operation (Sixty-second Annual Report of the Trustees for the Year 1930). A new feature of the museum's educational programme is the development of the training of teachers, for whom three special courses have been instituted. But the school services also increase by leaps and bounds, so that the 23,000,000 contacts with school children in 1930 almost double those of the year before. The lantern slides loaned to public schools well exceeded a million, and it is interesting to find that the growth of the film service shows that for class purposes the narrow width film (16 mm.) is more appreciated as an aid in teaching than the standard (35 mm.) film, the real place of which is the assembly hall.