294 Naturalist at Large 



best in the world and he has 1376 types and something in 

 the vicinity of 60,000 specimens. 



Thanks to Mr. Agassiz, our collection of echinoderms is 

 excellent. This is the department in which he himself was 

 most interested. Years ago he invited Dr. Hubert Lyman 

 Clark to come here to be his associate and study these 

 groups and he still continues to have general charge. There 

 are of sea urchins 554 species, represented by 145 types. 

 This is the largest proportion in relation to the total number 

 of species in the world of any collection in the whole 

 Museum. Brittle stars, represented by 11 14 species, 442 

 types; starfish, 759 species, 150 types; and the sea cucum- 

 bers, represented by 484 species and 120 types, form a 

 good proportion of the species described, but our collec- 

 tion of sea lilies, or crinoids, is not to be compared with 

 the one which Austin Clark has built up in Washington. 

 But of these groups there are in all 104,000 specimens and 

 7000 types, which is a good showing. 



The Museum by tradition has always been interested in 

 fossil fishes and we have a splendid collection of about 

 44,880 specimens contained in no less than 1122 trays. I 

 am not as familiar with this material as I should be, although 

 I once worked for some time on the material from Mount 

 Lebanon and found that we had a large proportion of the 

 species which have been discovered there. Our recent 

 accessions have been from Cuba and our oldest material is, 

 of course, the European collections which were brought 

 to this country by Louis Agassiz. This we are fortunate to 

 possess for, generally speaking, American museums are 

 weak in European material and for comparative purposes 

 these collections are very important. Henry Stetson gave 



