Boros István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 3. (Budapest 1953)
Boros, I.: The exhibitions of the Hungarian National Museum Museum of Natural History
% tinted in colors corresponding to the exhibited material and also effective in their plasticity. The 369 252 visitors who attended the Exhibition in 1952, testify that a natural history museum can fulfill its social function only by the arrangement of such exhibitions and can but develop along these lines. 4. The Mineralogical Exhibition The old mineralogical exhibition demonstrated it to the layman at once that the mineralogical collection of the Museum is very large, — as it indubitably is. The visitor, as in all other museums of the world, saw unknown and unheard of minerals in the long alleyways of overcrowded cases in seven large rooms, and though one exhibit was more beautiful than the other, he could not profit more than to read the name and collecting locality of the various specimens or their chemical formulae — if he understood it at all. Of pyrites alone there were 100 specimens in one case, of various calcites 150 pieces in three cases, of quartzes 350 in four cases ; shortly, he was blinded by an almost unsurveyable quantity. The impression which the visitor brought away with him, if he were only a layman, was that there are very many minerals in the world and that the Museum has a very nice collection of them. The new, remodelled exhibition offersatotallydifferentview. Itis an instructive, enlightening collection, showing the science of mineralogy in its whole, and in its relations to everyday practice. It does not stun by the multitude of exhibited minerals but rather educates and teaches by carefully selected-and characteristical, and of course always beautiful, pieces. Everything it shows it also elucidates ; though not content to facilitate the understanding and penetration into the secrets of science above the mere evidence, it tries to illustrate the recognition of natural laws, their employment fur human purposes and their role in everyday life. Instead of the seven rooms of the former exhibition, we have set up the new one in-five rooms, if temporarily only. The material of the first room elucidates the general properties of minerals, the second and third display a systematically ordered mineralogical collection, the fourth deals with rocks, and the fifth illustrates the practical signi f icance and role of the mineral world in the life of man, titled »Minerals, Rocks, and Man«. The material of the first room was arranged in accordance with the following plan : The structure of tne Earth ; What is a mineral? (cases 1—2) ; Crystals (cases 3—5; ; The intergrowth of crystals, ideal and distorted forms, crystals on rocks and in rocks (case 6) ; The internal structures of minerals (cases 7—8) ; The periodic table of elements (case 9) ; The physical qualities of minerals (cases 10—13, a separate case showing luminescence) ; The process of crystallization (cases 14—16) ; The paragenesis of minerals, (the pseudomorphism of minerals) (case 17). By the subdivision of the specific themes into chapters, the exhibition teaches basic ideas step by step. The material exhibited in cases 1—2 does this by the following examples : The materi?l and structure of the Earth, its spheres ; Rocks as the material of the firm crust of the Earth ; Minerals as the material of rocks ; The mineral itself. The display of minerals instructs in the same way, step by step, all those phenomenons and laws which help orientation in the maze of all the miraculous and amazing formations. The objects of cases 7—9 reveal, solving former mysteries, the natural explanation of the origin and development of crystals,
