university publications instead of to the magazines of large circulation. For if the majority of Americans knew the need of the Indians and what they mean to us, the response to their need would be immeasurably better than it is.
The specialists should lay aside the diffidence that is natural to them when there is a question of popularizing their theme, and use every opportunity to bring the present-day problem of the Indian to general attention. Unfortunately not all such means of approach are available. Last year a proposal was made to the Metropolitan Museum in New York to organize a great exhibition of Indian art for that institution, the aid of distinguished authorities and loans from the most important collections being promised. The directors of the Metropolitan received the offer in a sympathetic spirit and agreed that the showing of a folk-art alive in our country to-day was a matter of great interest. Certain agreements entered into with the Museum of Natural History, however, leave Indian matters to the latter institution, and so the project, at least in so far as it concerned the art museum, had to be given up. Those who had conceived the idea of the exhibition felt that it would lose most of its point if it were held in the Natural History Museum, as the ethnological aspect it must have there would be a matter of no new interest to the general public. What should be the outstanding feature for the lay visitor to the exhibition is the fact that the Indian has produced a genuine and valuable art, and that he is continuing to do so. The exhibition will be held in New York in March, with this point in view, laying more emphasis on the work of to-day than had been planned.
After seeing the modern work of the Indians, we shall be better prepared to go to the collections of the older objects. It is hoped to open to the public this spring one of the greatest of these, at the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Familiar to most of us from childhood as the relics of a savage period, the Indian things reveal themselves in a startlingly new light if we think of them as art. To some it will seem at first that only by an extension of the term can it be applied to the work of the Indians.
Let these people begin a new acquaintance with the sculpture and the architecture of ancient Mexico—the greatest art which has yet been produced in the Western Hemisphere. Americans in Italy have often wondered how it is possible for a people with the work of the
