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# THE INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
Coal gas is but one step in the improved use of fuel. The whole machinery of sugar-making is as novel as it is economical. Bread can be baked on an hour's notice by iron hands as cleanly as expeditious. Steam-engines, which almost seem intelligent, card, dye, and weave, whatever textile raw material you give them, and by and by cut it and sew it if required.
Had we only, accordingly, the old Industrial Arts, thus for ever renewing themselves, the necessity for keeping pace with them would be argument enough for an Industrial Museum, where their progress could be watched and studied by all. But besides those elder sons and servants of mercantile enterprise—who, like the eagle, seem to grow younger as they grow older—think of the infant arts which have been born in our own day, and are younger than most of us. Each of them, a Hercules in his cradle, has already strangled serpents, and has more than twelve labours before him. Railway-making, electro-metallurgy, electro-telegraphy and photography, may here represent those Titanic babes, who, already with mature faces, are bidding all men look to the new time-ball which they have dropped before them, and see that their chronometers are set by that.
# AND COMMERCIAL ENTERPRISE
IV. I have hitherto referred almost solely to the Exhibitional galleries of the Museum. To render, however, their contents useful to the public, they must be carefully classified, intelligibly labelled, and described at some length in suitable catalogues. The Museum therefore must include within its walls, a laboratory and workshop where the nature of unknown substances and the powers of new machines may be investigated, and a library where the literature of industrial science may be available for the guidance of the officers of the institution in classifying the contents of the Museum. Further, an essential appendage of an Industrial Museum is a lecture-room, where detailed prelections may be given on the contents of the Museum, and where in addition, the various industrial arts may be expounded in relation to the laws or principles on which they are based, and may be illustrated not only by the objects in the Exhibitional galleries, but by maps, diagrams, drawings, chemical and mechanical experiments, the exhibition on the small scale of manufacturing processes, and of machines at work; as well as through the medium of the other appliances employed in University and other classrooms by teachers of the physical sciences.
All the existing Industrial Museums, except that at Kew, are supplemented by laboratory, library, and