Jan., 1919. Annual Report of the Director. 235 



of the Division of Ichthyology and Herpetology has proceeded through- 

 out the year. Most of the new material entered and some of the old 

 material has been supplied with tin tags, stamped in the machine pur- 

 chased for that purpose last year. In the Division of Osteology fifteen 

 skeletons were catalogued and index cards were written for the same. 

 Including the duplicates, 1,700 shell labels were received from the 

 printer. Of this number 1,381 have been installed. There were also 

 installed 133 labels for scorpions, tarantulas, centipedes and silkworms. 

 The following table shows the work performed on catalogues and 

 the inventorying accomplished: 



accessions. — The Curator of Anthropology makes the following 

 observations on the painted Japanese screen of the Tosa school presented 

 to the Museum by Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus in commemoration of the 

 Director's twenty-fifth anniversary of service: The Tosa school, so 

 named for the painter Tsunetaka, a governor of Tosa Province, flour- 

 ished in the thirteenth century, and in its artistic aspirations was anti- 

 Chinese, cultivating a vigorous nationalism and representing the taste 

 of Japanese aristocracy as developed at the court of Kyoto. The char- 

 acteristics of the Tosa masters were a magnificent combination of 

 harmonious color and remarkable skill of composition. In conformity 

 with their national tendencies they turned their attention toward his- 

 torical subjects, and as illustrators of historical incidents or court 

 romances and ceremonies on a grand scale they are peerless in the 

 pictorial annals of Japan. In the epic style of their painted narratives 

 they became for Japan what the rhapsodists of the Homeric poems were 

 for Greece. Their best work is accordingly found on screens and sliding 

 doors which offered the most suitable background for the expression of 

 their inspiring conceptions. Distinguished forms, a delicate finesse of 

 the brush exhibiting a decided affinity with the best miniatures of 

 Persia, and the illustrated missals of our middle ages, a delicate severity 

 of outlines, a certain conventionality of aristocratic sentiment, an 

 incomparable talent for minutest detail in depicting trees, flowers, and 

 birds, vivid, opaque and plastic coloration — these are the predominant 

 traits of Tosa art all of which are reflected in this screen. Art was en- 



