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the fringes of Manhattan Square.

    Grand hopes were sounded in a series of opening speeches, and Bickmore looked forward to the coming weeks, when the Museum would be thronged with crowds of excited visitors. But the following day, Bickmore opened the doors of the Museum to a paltry crowd, and in the following months Bickmore found himself wandering unhappily through virtually deserted exhibition halls. Unexpectedly, so soon after its jubilant opening, the Museum was plunged into a period of crisis that threatened to shut its doors permanently.

    MISERY ON MANHATTAN SQUARE

    Between the opening of the first building and 1880, the Museum got into serious trouble.

    During the first heady years of its life, the Museum had purchased a number of expensive collections. In 1874, for example, it paid $65,000 for the fossil invertebrate collection of Professor James Hall. This was undoubtedly an important purchase, and it kept this significant collection from being sold to a hungry German museum. (Louis Agassiz had once said that "whoever gets this collection gets the geological museum of America.") During a lifetime of meticulous collecting, Hall had amassed tens of thousands of fossils representing over 7,000 species; indeed, the collection was so important that the nomenclature of the geological structure of North America had been based on Hall's fossils. But it was also a very expensive acquisition—one that the thinly stretched Museum budget could ill afford.

    The Museum hoped to pay for the Hall collection with a public subscription. Unfortunately, the public proved to be quite uninterested in an aggregation of gray invertebrate fossils. Very little money came forth. The trustees found themselves in the uncomfortable position of making up the shortfall—not an inconsiderable amount for the time. The Hall collection and other enthusiastic purchases of a similar nature put the Museum seriously in debt.

    The location of the new Museum aggravated the cash-flow problem. The exhibition halls were virtually empty; more people visited the "rump" collection of natural history junk left behind in the Arsenal Building than came to the new Museum. The first two Presidents of the Museum, John David Wolfe and Robert L. Stuart, lacked the energy and time to put the Museum on a sound footing. Most of the other trustees were losing interest; fewer and fewer were coming to trustee meetings because the trip uptown was so inconvenient. In an effort to attract public attention, Bickmore would again and again persuade the trustees to advance funds for a new purchase, and again and again he would stage a grand unveiling. But each time, the flurry of visitors would soon drop off, leaving the Museum once again deserted.

    Some of the trustees began seriously to question the value of the Museum itself. One wrote that "no matter how fine the exhibits are, if no one saw them what good are they?" By 1880, the Museum was on the brink of extinction. The trustees had by and large clamped down on purchases, public interest was at a critically low level, and Museum President Robert L. Stuart had said that when he retired, he would recommend closing the Museum if no one could be found to take his place.

    The trustees decided that a report on the future needs and direction of the Museum was necessary. They gave the task to Morris K. Jesup, a Museum founder and wealthy railroad magnate and banker. They directed Jesup to devise a plan that would scale down the Museum's aims and goals, reduce expenses, and—most important—curtail the extravagant purchases of Bickmore and several other sympathetic trustees.

    Jesup was not particularly interested in or sympathetic to the science of natural history, and his sixth-grade education certainly didn't prepare him for understanding the complexities of the institution. But after spending time with Bickmore, wandering about the halls gazing at the fossils and stuffed animals, and chatting with the two curators taking