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labelled so I can understand them, and then I shall feel sure that others can understand,' summed up his prime desire."

    Perhaps most importantly for the Museum, Jesup recognized that the foundation for good exhibitions was good research and active collecting. He launched the Museum into a golden age of exploration—the fifty-year period from 1880 to 1930, when the Museum sent over a thousand expeditions into the field, many to the remotest corners of the earth. By 1930 the Museum had been involved with expeditions that discovered the North Pole; that penetrated unmapped areas of Siberia; that traversed Outer Mongolia and the great Gobi Desert; that penetrated the deepest jungles of the Congo—expeditions that, in fact, were to bring Museum representatives to every continent on the globe.

THREE

    The First Grand Expedition

    It was a golden age for natural science. The world stood poised on the edge of the twentieth century, but an explorer could still come face to face with Stone Age peoples who were entirely unaware of the existence of an outside world. Exploration and collection were still a dangerous business, in which the loss of life was not uncommon. On the other hand, science had matured to the point where people realized that the earth's resources were not infinite. The new science of anthropology, for example, suddenly made people aware that cultures were dying out all over the world, and that an effort had to be made to save what was left. Technology had recently provided the tools to do so—including the camera and the wax-cylinder phonograph.

    On the other hand, zoologists and biologists saw an entire globe virtually unexplored scientifically, and accessible in a way that it never had been before. New discoveries in many branches of natural science were following thick and fast: dinosaurs were discovered in the American West, remarkable new species of animals were found in the African jungles, new lands discovered in the Arctic. More than anything, natural scientists of the late nineteenth century believed deeply in the value of collections. To them, collections were facts. They held secrets about the world; secrets that could be extracted through careful study. Collections would reveal the relationships among all life on the planet, including human beings. They would be a resource for scientists centuries into the future, long after such things no longer existed in the wild. And on a more human level, spectacular collections and brilliant discoveries brought glory and fame to collectors, their institutions, and the benefactors who provided them with funds.

    In 1895, President Jesup hired a young man, Franz Boas, to be the assistant curator m the Department of Ethnology. An austere man with a forceful personality, Boas was a meticulous, careful researcher who had unconventional—even radical—ideas about cultural anthropology. Before Boas, anthropologists had ranked human societies on a kind of evolutionary ladder; some races, they believed, were obviously better than others. The best and most advanced of all, of course, was the white Protestant culture of Western Europe and America.

    Boas disagreed. He believed that all cultures were intrinsically equal—a view called cultural relativism. If this was so, Boas figured, one could learn as much about humanity by studying a small tribe in British Columbia as by studying a great civilization. But Boas saw many of the small cultures he wanted to study dying out, and he believed that with their death, priceless information would be lost forever. Time was running out, and he felt the urgent need to collect and save everything possible from these cultures for the benefit of future generations. In particular, Boas saw the fragile aboriginal cultures of the North Pacific rim of North America poised at the edge of extinction, and he realized that his might well be the last opportunity anyone would have to study these cultures. In earlier trips to the Northwest