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Last week Dr. Andrews pointed to his museum's new exhibits as honest tender of what he could do with $10,779,925 which his trustees want to add to the present $16,176,640 endowment of their $62,000,000 establishment. They "have cases of material in their cellars, multitudes of ideas in their curators' heads, which they want to show the public. In a new Hall of Man they want to show "man's embryology, development of his body, unfolding of his behavior, his genetics, and a resume of his achievements over the ages." They want a microvivarium to show how ameba and other one-cell animals live. They want to show how to farm frogs, how to make pocketbooks from snake skins.
The museum trustee who last week undertook to head the campaign for the $10,779,925 is Lawyer Alexander Perry Osborn, eldest son of the museum's late President Henry Fairfield Osborn. Out of Princeton in 1905, out of Harvard Law School (he edited the Harvard Law Review) in 1909, young Perry Osborn became special guardian of the infant children of John Jacob Astor after that multi-millionaire sank with the S. S. Titanic (1912). During the War, he organized the War Credits Board. He served as chairman of the committee for the reorganization of the Army General Staff. Currently Mr. Osborn, 52, having resigned directorates in a finance company, a printing company, an oil company, is a director of the Western Pacific Railroad.
Biggest argument for donations which Mr. Osborn has is the museum's increasing popularity. Attendance . exceeded 1,000,000 in 1932 and rose steadily to 2,491,582 last year, will surpass that this year. Through motion picture and lantern slide shows and circulating collections, curators last year reached another 40,000,000 minds.
The American Museum's consistent increase of attendance is unique among U. S. museums of natural history. In 1933 Chicago's Field Museum took care of 3,269,300, last year 1,191,437. In 1933 Los Angeles' Museum of History, Science & Art attendance was 1,276,911, last year 597,079. It and other museums attribute their peak popularity to Depression when free entertainment and shelter attracted full houses. This year attendance is generally increasing, apparently due to new interests which museum directors are stirring in their communities. And every new interest stirs a hope for gifts in the management's heart.
Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, like Manhattan's American Museum, is also out to raise millions. But this is a new idea. Until last March when he conducted an astonishingly successful Symposium on Early Man, Charles Meigs Biddle Cadwalader, 51, the museum's unpaid managing director thought of raising merely $374,915 from other rich Philadelphians "for a five-year educational program." Up went Mr. Cadwalader's imagination and requests to $10,000,000 for endowment and $8,000,000 for a new building. And the trustees of this oldest (125 years) museum of natural history in the U. S. upped him to the unpaid job of president.
Chicago's Field Museum last week appointed Clifford Cilley Gregg, 42, Boy Scout patron and onetime executive of Marshall Field & Co., to be director. He is not contemplating any drive for funds. But he "could use some" to mount, for example, a group of storks from Poland.