But remember this,
you only get knowledge at a cost. I mean to say that the man that would
know something, can only get the knowledge at first hand. The people who
wander around this junk shop that you call a museum, go out as empty
headed as they came in. Consider. Say a Fiji islander came here and took
back with him from the United States an electric light bulb, a stuffed
possum, an old hat, a stalactite from the Mammoth cave, a sackful of
pecan nuts, a pair of handcuffs, half a dozen photographs and a dozen
packing cases full of things gathered from here and there, and then set
the whole junk pile up under a roof in the Fiji Islands, what would his
fellow Fijians know from that of the social life of this country. Eh?
Tell me that?"
"You exaggerate," I protested. "You take an extreme point of view."
"I don't," he said.
His contradictions would have made me angry, perhaps, were they not made
in such a quiet tone of voice.
"Take anything from its natural surroundings," he went on, "and it is
meaningless. The dull-eyed men and women that wander through this Museum
of yours are just killing time. There's no education in that kind of
thing. Besides, what they see are dead things, anyway, and you can't
study human nature in a morgue."
He resumed his seat on the window sill, then took from an inner pocket a
leather wallet, and drew from that a photograph which he tossed across
so that it fell on the desk before me.
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