Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo13amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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320 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL size and shape, and of actual colonies of many types of useful and harmful bacteria showing how mass cultures of the microbes look to the naked eye. The relation of insects to disease is a particularly fruitful field for museum work and is the one upon which we are chiefly engaged at the present time. The American Museum already has in its department of invertebrate zoology wonderful enlarged models of mosquitoes and the department of public health has just installed a model of the house-fly, enlarged forty diameters, which took its skilled artist-modeler, Mr. Ignaz Matausch, nearly a year to complete. A wide series of facts bearing on the life history of the fly are illustrated as well as the relation of the fly to disease, the practical methods for its control and the results achieved thereby. A similar, but more enlarged model of the flea (carrier of bubonic plague) is now under preparation and we have already installed models, some small and some life size, dealing with the rats which harbor the plague microbe and from which the flea carries it to man. The opportunity for future development here, and in connection with the mosquitoes of malaria and yellow fever, and a score of other disease- carriers, is a tempting one which we hope to develop in the next few years. This hall is our first opportunity to serve the public schools in their work of health education. They bring their classes to the Museum in one of the periods allotted to civic biology and in an hour with these models and diagrams learn more than they could get from books and lectures in a month. In addition to the hall, which is open to all the visitors to the Mu- seum (numbering eight hundred thousand a year), we arrange special lectures to the school children on the occasion of their visits. It is the policy of the Museum to pro- vide lectures (generally illustrated) on any subject within its field for any teacher who may ask it and for any number of pupils, from a score to a thousand. Or, if the teacher prefers to give the lecture himself, we provide hall, lantern slides and operator. The larger high schools send their classes twice a year near the end of each term for a talk on water or milk, or insect-borne disease, city-cleaning or some other topic which fits into the course of study at the time. New York is a large city however, and the children from many of the schools can come to the Museum only a few times a year. It was necessary to get our illustrative material into the schools themselves if it was really to be effective. For some time the American Museum has taken an active part in the nature study work of the public schools by circulating loan collections of birds, insects, mollusks, sponges, corals, woods, minerals and the like. Over 500 of these cabinets circulated in 491 schools in 1912 reaching 1,275,890 children. Of this work President Osborn of the Museum has said, "Step by step a great system of cooperation has been built up be- tween the regular course work in the schools and the visual instruction in the Museum,
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How Disease is Prevented. . .Pasteurizing means heating the milk to 150°-160° F. for 20 minutes. This does not injure the milk.. . but kills all the germs of disease. . .Impure water can be purified. . .by boiling it. Quoted from American Museum School Chart

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