# The Dedication of Germanic Museum of Harvard University/Address by President Eliot

As recorded in German American Annals, v. 2, no. 1 (January 1904).
​The Chairman then introduced the President of the University.
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT ELIOT.
For many generations manuscripts and books have been the accepted means of transmitting knowledge, and keeping the ​records of our race; and so writings and printed books, with buildings, have been the chief resources of a university. John Harvard founded Harvard College with his library and £800; but now museums, as well as books, are essential to the work of any university. They are peculiarly necessary in an American university; for we are a now conglomerate people, in a fresh land which has no monuments that are not recent, at the opening of an epoch characterized by tremendous new powers drawn by man from nature. These powers have changed profoundly every human occupation and the whole mode of life of civilized man; but their province is the material world and man's material welfare. Indirectly, to be sure, they contribute to intellectual growth; but they have little to do with the creation of beauty or loveliness, or with the growth of piety and righteousness among men. Moreover, these powers may be as mighty for destruction as for construction; for selfish ends as for beneficent.
At the present stage of the world's advance there is more danger everywhere that material may clog spiritual progress, than there was three centuries or six centuries ago, just because of the sudden and disproportionate development of material forces and interests. Especially is this the case in a lusty, gigantic democracy, which sets a high value on crude forces, and does not always remember that a true democracy must be intensely idealistic as well as frankly materialistic. All modern universities need museums which illustrate adequately the materials of the earth's crust, the flora and fauna of both land and sea, and the entire past of the human race, its dwellings, utensils, tools and weapons, its arts, crafts, institutions and religions; but the American universities need especially collections which illustrate systematically and amply the products of the fine arts and the artistic crafts in earlier but surviving civilizations. Such a collection the Germanic Museum is to be.
The development of museums at Harvard University began in the eighteenth century with the collection of physical apparatus, and the museum of medical and surgical specimens. It was continued in the nineteenth with rocks and minerals, with machines and models illustrating the application of science to the useful arts, with dried plants in the Herbarium and living plants ​in the Botanic Garden, and with geological and zoölogical collections in the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy.
Thus far, the collections illustrated physics, mechanics, and natural history; but with the foundation of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology a new era began. That museum was devoted to the records of prehistoric races, and of the savage, barbarous, or semi-civilized peoples who had inhabited the American continent. The admirable collection of living trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants at the Arnold Arboretum followed. Next came the Fogg Museum, with its representations of Greek and Roman art, and of the later arts of the Latin races around the Mediterranean. Then the Semitic Museum illustrated the civilizations of Babylon, Egypt, and Judea. Next the history of architecture began to be depicted in the collections of Nelson Robinson, Jr., Hall; and now arrives the Germanic Museum, illustrating the arts and crafts of the Germanic peoples wherever settled, and recalling Teutonic aesthetic achievements from the eleventh to the eighteenth century. Since the establishment of the Peabody Museum, the new university collections, with the single exception of the Arnold Arboretum, have illustrated anthropology, archaeology, and the history of civilization.
The last event in this series is the most interesting of them all, because of the intimate connections of American civilization with the German civilization. Doubtless the growth of the Germanic Museum here would have been slow, if it had not been for the great impulse given to the movement two years ago by the generous and suggestive act of His Majesty, the German Emperor. That act was unique in the history of this university, and indeed in the history of education.
A second great gift to the Museum from German scholars, high officials, and successful men of affairs has just been made known to us by the address to which the distinguished representative of the Emperor has already alluded. This gift is an admirable series of fifty-five galvano-plastic reproductions of precious products of the German silversmiths' art from the middle ages to the eighteenth century. The names of the personages who combined to prepare this gift make a remarkable list. To ​mention only those who have died since the inception of this undertaking in April, 1902, there stand on this list the names of Mommsen, the historian, Virchow, the naturalist, and Dümmler, the head of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. The collection was brought together for the first time as a contribution to our Germanic Museum; it is to-day on exhibition at Berlin. Such a gift from such men is peculiarly welcome to this society of scholars.
To mark his sense of the importance in academic history of the events that this day commemorates, a Harvard teacher of history who has already done much to promote the growth and usefulness of the University Library, has asked permission to give to that library ten thousand volumes on German history, and to make this gift, through its book-plates, a commemoration of the visit of Prince Henry of Prussia to this institution on the 6th of March, 1902. This generous act recalls to mind that the records of civilization through the long future, as in the past, are to be in part preserved in printed books, as well as in museums.
The Germanic Museum will doubtless prove to be the first of a group of museums, illustrating at this institution the progress of civilization among the leading races of mankind down to recent years. Year after year it will teach American students how the Germans developed artistic crafts and created beauty centuries before America was discovered. The members of Harvard University have occasion to know how the present generation of Germans practices the fine crafts and cultivates the fine arts. They owe to German hands their unique collection of glass models of flowers, a collection which is the very climax of artistic craftsmanship. It is brought home to them every year that the best musical and dramatic organizations in this country are in German hands; and they know that there are no loftier products of genius than noble music and drama, except the worthy approaches of the human spirit to Almighty God. The Germanic Museum will teach them how the German artistic sense and capacity have been developed and transmitted through long generations.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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