A museum has three main justifications for its existence. In the first place, like a home for lost dogs, it is a repository for stray objects. No curator should endeavour to procure for his museum any antiquity which could be safely exhibited on its original site* and in its original position. He should receive only those stray objects which otherwise would be lost to sight, or those which would be in danger of destruction. The curator of a picture gallery is perfectly justified in purchasing any old master which is legitimately on sale; but he is not justified in obtaining a painting direct from the walls of a church where it has hung for centuries, and where it should still hang. In the same way a curator of a museum of antiquities should make it his first endeavour not so much to obtain objects direct from Egypt as to gather in those antiquities which are in the possession of private persons who cannot be expected to look after them with due care. *Transcriber's note: Original text read "sight". In the second place, a museum is a store-house for historical documents such as papyri and ostraca, and in this respect it is simply to be regarded as a kind of public library, capable of unlimited and perfectly legitimate expansion. Such objects are not often found by robbers in the tombs which they have violated, nor are they snatched from temples to which they belong. They are almost always found accidentally, and in a manner which precludes any possibility of their actual position having much significance. The immediate purchase, for example, by museum agents of the Tell el Amarna tablets--the correspondence of a great Pharaoh--which had been discovered by accident, and would perhaps have been destroyed, was most wise. In the third place, a museum is a permanent exhibition for the instruction of the public, and for the enlightenment of students desirous of obtaining comparative knowledge in any one branch of their work, and for this purpose it should be well supplied not so much with original antiquities as with casts, facsimiles, models, and reproductions of all sorts.