Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, Louis Agassiz: his life and correspondence, third edition

In laying out the general plan, which was rarely absent from his thought, he distinguished between the demands which the specialist and the general observer might make upon an institution intended to instruct and benefit both. Here the special student should find in the laboratories and work rooms all the needed material for his investigations, stored in large collections, with duplicates enough to allow for that destruction of specimens which is necessarily involved in original research. The casual visitor meanwhile should walk through exhibition rooms, not simply crowded with objects to delight and interest him, but so arranged that the selection of every specimen should have reference to its part and place in nature; while the whole should be so combined as to explain, so far as known, the faunal and systematic relations of animals in the actual world, and in the geological formations; or, in other words, their succession in time, and their distribution in space.