Museum

Museum (Gr. mouscion), originally the name given by the ancients to a temple of the Muses, and afterwards to a building devoted to science, learning, and the fine arts. The first museum of this kind was the celebrated Alexandrian Museum—a meeting-place for learned men and a library, founded about 280 B.C. in the palace. After the revival of learning in Europe the term museum came to be applied to collections of antiquities, and sculptures, and paintings. Collections illustrative of natural history and other sciences now form a chief part of the treasures of many of the greatest museums, and there are museums devoted to particular branches of science, and to illustrating the industrial arts. Of the museums of Britain, the British Museum (q.v.) and that of South Kensington (see KENSINGTON) are the most important. The museums of the Vatican in Rome, of the Louvre in Paris, of St Petersburg, Dresden, Vienna, Munich, and Berlin, and the National Museum at Washington also are among the greatest in the world. See the Address of the President of the British Association, 1889.