66 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1913. 



tees of the British Museum are due to the authorities of the former 

 institution for tiie facilities gi'anted to him for carrying through the 

 preparation of the Catalogue, a work which involved a furlough of 

 two years and a half from his usual duties at Washington." It is 

 furthermore interesting to learn from the introduction that while the 

 British Museum has the largest collection of European land mammals 

 extant, numbering about 5,000 specimens, the National Museum, 

 ^vith about 4,000 specimens, follows next, and that without the hel]> 

 of the latter collection a monogi-aphic study of these animals could 

 not have been made. 



Mr. N. Hollister, assistant curator, was chiefly occupied in working 

 up the collection of mammals from the Altai Mountains, but he also 

 brought nearly to completion an annotated review of the mammals 

 of the Philippine Islands. Dr. M. W. Lyon, jr., formerly of the divi- 

 sion, finished a monograph of the tree shrews and began the prepa- 

 ration of a review of the mammal fauna of the Borussan Islands. 



Besides members of the Biological Survey of the Department of 

 Agriculture, the collections were consulted by Prof. O. P. Hay, of 

 Washington; Dr. H. H. Donaldson, of the Wistar Institute, Phila- 

 delphia, Pa,; Dr. J, S. Foote, of the Creighton Medical College, 

 Omaha, Nebr.; and Mr. Childs Frick, of New York. Specimens were 

 lent for study to Dr. Leisewitz, of Munich, Bavaria; Mr. K. Andersen, 

 of the British Museum ; Mr. W. H. Osgood, of the Field Museum of 

 Natural History; Dr. D. G. Elliot, of New York, and others. 



Birds. — Most prominent among the additions to this division was 

 the magnificent series of over 5,000 bird skins from Abyssinia and 

 British East Africa, collected by Dr. E. A. Mearns on the Childs Frick 

 expedition, and deposited by Mr. Frick. Containing several generic 

 types not previously in the Museum, this contribution splendidly 

 supplements the earlier collections from East Africa, including those 

 made by the Smithsonian expedition under Col. Theodore Roosevelt 

 and by Dr. W. L. Abbott at Kilimanjaro, and places the Museum in 

 possession of one of the best representations of the bird fauna of that 

 part of the world. Mr. H. C. Raven transmitted 488 specimens from 

 Borneo, and the Bureau of Fisheries 61 skins from Celebes and other 

 islands of the Dutch East Indies, obtained during a recent cruise of 

 the steamer Albatross. From this bureau were also received 108 

 skeletons, 137 eggs, and 2 nests from the Pribilof Islands, and Dr. 

 L. C. Sanford, of New Haven, Conn., contributed 25 skins chiefly 

 from Alaska, including the types of Loxia curvirostra i^ercna and 

 Micropallas whitneyi sanfordi. Several skins and eggs of rare birds 

 fi'om Samoa and Niuafu Island were presented by Mr. Mason Mtchell, 

 American consul at Apia, among them being the skin and eggs of 

 Megapodius pritcJiardi, which are new to the Museum ; and eggs of 

 two other rare species, namely, the ocellated turkey, Agriocharis 



