REPORT ON THE DEPARTMENT OF BIOLOGY. 

 By Leonhaed Stejnegee, Head Curator. 



After an absence of three months spent in field work in the Bering 

 Sea region in cooperation with the Bureau of Fisheries, I returned 

 to duty on September 20, 1922, and at once resumed charge of the 

 Department. Special reference is made to this in the present con- 

 nection, because it illustrates and emphasizes an activity of the 

 Museum, which is too often overlooked by the public, namely, the 

 enormous amount of work performed by this institution in coopera- 

 tion with other agencies of the Government, with museums at home 

 and abroad, with universities and other scientific and educational es- 

 tablishments as well as with private investigators, for which the 

 Museum institution receives but scant credit. And yet, cooperation 

 is the red thread that runs through all our activities, and has been so 

 from the very beginning. As early as 1854 Prof. S. F. Baird, then 

 Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, reported how " the 

 applications for assistance with materials for research are constantly 

 being received and always met with all possible promptness, so that 

 scarcely any natural history monograph or memoir of any extent has 

 been published in this country within a year or two, which has not 

 been indebted in this way to the Institution." And as it was then, 

 so it is now, as shown by the entries in the appended bibliography. 

 A survey of the field shows that this Department is or has been re- 

 cently cooperating with practically all the federal departments ; with 

 all the larger museums of natural history in this country and abroad ; 

 with most of the universities ; with all the botanical gardens in this 

 country and many in Europe and elsewhere ; with independent scien- 

 tific institutions like the Carnegie Institution of Washington; with 

 important exploration expeditions in distant parts of the world ; and 

 with a practically endless number of minor institutions and private 

 investigators everywhere. Of larger, more recent, cooperative proj- 

 ects I may call special attention to the cooperation with the Car- 

 negie Institution for the study of the world's Cactaceae, and the 

 breeding experiments with Cerions, a group of West Indian terres- 

 trial mollusks on the Florida Keys; the cooperation with the New 

 York Botanical Garden and the Gray Herbarium of Harvard Uni- 

 versity for the botanical exploration of northern South America 

 since 1918 and still in progress. Under that agreement eight dif- 



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