Abstract
ALTHOUGH some aspects of museum activity fail to interest the modern public, the enormous influence of the American Natural History Museum, New York, is cited by Charles Russell in its journal, Natural History (Dec. 1940). Statistics show the Museum has: 2,000,000 annual visitors, including its Planetarium; 25,000,000 contacts by its Department of Education; 624,000,000 hour-listening to its radio programmes; 1,000,000 learners taught by its education staff; 200,000 miles a year travelled by museum trucks making 40,000 deliveries to schools, hospitals, prisons, colleges and universities; 480,000 visitors to Bear Mountain trailside museums; 35,000 orders for loan materials outside New York, and 27,000 subscribers to its journal. “The real work of the Museum,” states Russell, “is to help people become more aware of themselves and of their surroundings, to help them think in terms of realities, not theories.”
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The American Public and Natural History. Nature 147, 203 (1941). https://doi.org/10.1038/147203a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/147203a0