CHICAGO 

 NATURAL 

 HISTORY 

 MUSEUM 



N EWS 



MUSEUM STAFF CHANGES 



John R. Millar 



Becomes Curator Emeritus 



After 46 Years 



After a long and distinguished career 

 of service to the Museum, Mr. John R. 

 Millar has retired as Chief Curator of 

 Botany to become Curator Emeritus. 



John Millar came to the Museum for 

 the first time on February 1, 1918, when 

 he was a young man not yet twenty 



for more than a year in reinstalling 

 these materials in the new home. 



Mr. Millar has served the Museum 

 in many capacities. Shortly after he 

 came to the Museum, he spent a num- 

 ber of months at the Plant Introduction 

 Laboratory of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture in Miami, where 

 he collected material and made models 

 for exhibition in the now famous Stan- 

 ley Field Collection of Plant Models. 



Louis Williams 

 Appointed Botany 

 Chief Curator 



years old. His first position was that 

 of preparator in the Department of 

 Botany, under the supervision of the 

 late Dr. B. E. Dahlgren. At that time 

 the Museum was housed in Jackson 

 Park in the Palace of Fine Arts Building, 

 which had been built for the World's 

 Columbian Exposition of 1893. 



Mr. Millar is the only person cur- 

 rently on the Museum's staff who par- 

 ticipated in the Museum's move, in 

 1920, from Jackson Park to its present 

 building in Grant Park — a move that 

 necessitated the construction of special 

 railroad tracks to facilitate the trans- 

 port of hundreds of thousands of speci- 

 mens and exhibits. Millar, with the 

 rest of the Museum's staff, was occupied 



Page U APRIL 



John R. Millar, with 

 Mrs. Millar, partakes 

 of a cup of coffee at 

 the Museum retirement 

 tea given in his honor. 

 Pouring is Mrs. Dor- 

 othy Gibson. 



Below: John Millar 

 shakes hands with the 

 new Chief Curator of 

 Botany, Dr. Louis 0. 

 Williams. 



Further work of a similar kind was per- 

 formed on subsequent expeditions to 

 British Guiana in 1922, to Brazil in 

 1926, and to the Bay of Fundyin 1937. 



In January of 1937, Millar was ap- 

 pointed Curator of the N. W. Harris 

 Public School Extension. In this posi- 

 tion he was able to expand the scope of 

 operation and increase the services per- 

 formed by the Museum for the grade 

 schools of Chicago. 



In 1946 Millar was made Deputy 

 Director of the Museum. He served 

 in this capacity until 1960 when he 

 was appointed Chief Curator of Botany. 

 Now, as Curator Emeritus, he will again 

 be wholly occupied with the exhibition 

 program of the Department. 



N, 



I ew chief Curator of the Depart- 

 ment of Botany is Dr. Louis O. Williams, 

 who has been Curator of Central Amer- 

 ican Botany. 



Dr. Williams did his undergraduate 

 work at the University of Wyoming and 

 received his doctorate from Washing- 

 ton University. Before coming to the 

 Museum in 1960, he was botanist with 

 the New Crops Research Branch of the 

 U.S. Department of Agriculture; sub- 

 director of the Escuela Agricola Pan- 

 americana in Honduras; and research 

 associate at the Ames Orchid Herbar- 

 ium of Harvard University. 



The new Chief Curator's primary re- 

 search interest is in the flora of the 

 American tropics. He has lived in Latin 

 America for fifteen years and explored 

 most of its tropical regions. Results 

 of his work have been published in more 

 than a hundred papers, monographs, 

 and floristic studies on the Central 

 American region. Currently, two of his 

 research projects are being assisted by 

 grants from the National Science Foun- 

 dation. 



