The Year 3000 | ✔️

Chapter 11

The museum of Andropoli. - The Gallery and the peripatetics. - The natural sciences section. - Possible men. - The analysis and the synthesis put together. - Part of the Museum reserved for human work. - Concentric circles and centrifugal rays. - The stain on the topographical map of art history.

Paolo and Maria also wanted to see the Museum of Andropoli, which is quite far from the capital, and can be seen from a distance; placed as it is on the plateau of a vast hill.

It is a huge circular building and around it a portico with columns runs, where on rainy days the citizens of Andropoli often walk.

That walk is the favorite of the men of study, who are sure to always find some scholar or scientist, who spends a few hours there, resting from the labors of thought and enjoying at the same time the splendid panorama of the city at the bottom; and gardens scattered here and there, between neighborhoods and neighborhoods of the immense planetary metropolis.

This is a place rarely visited by the gallant ladies and the idle rich and there is no lack of scientific and literary disputes: so much so that in Andropoli, with an irony that seems to be a eulogy, it is said of a pedantic man or a knower: you you are a peripatico or a man of the gallery of the Museum .

Satire, however, does not attack that gallery, where the most educated men of the city instruct each other, disputing and conversing in friendly conversations.

And the gallery is also beautiful, adorned with peregrine plants always in bloom, which bring out the white statues, which rise between them and which are erected to the greatest men of all times and who have become illustrious in the sciences, in letters and in the arts.

That admirable course gave birth to the idea of ​​founding an ebdomadary newspaper, The Museum Gallery ; that publishes, in the form of conversations, the literary and scientific controversies of the day and that they are really made in that place or are imagined to have occurred.

Who has little time or little money to read many newspapers, even with the mere reading of the Museum Gallery , can say to follow the movement of thought throughout the world, keeping abreast of all new discoveries, of all new inventions.

From the gallery one enters through various doors into the real Museum, which brings together in one center all the products of nature and man.

The Natural History Museum is also circular and revolves around the gallery, and those who did the whole tour could well say that they had traveled around the world.

In fact, starting from one end, one begins to travel the world of minerals and rocks, all represented by large and splendid specimens, which bear the name of the mineral and its origin.

In that museum the analysis always alternates with the synthesis; so in the department dedicated to minerals, after having seen them gathered together according to their nature, they are seen to be united instead according to the country that produced them.

So for example, where mineral and geological Italy is represented, you see a sample of all its minerals and then beautiful splits of the Alps, Apennines and stratified rocks of minor chains.

From the minerals we pass to the Kingdom of plants and even here analysis and synthesis join hands.

Mushrooms, algae, lichens, the simplest organisms of the plant world open up the array and the microscopic beings are reproduced in large proportions, so at first glance the structure can be seen.

This for the vulgar of the educated people; for botanists, every creature is kept in an antiseptic liquid, so that it can be studied with a microscope.