1884.] NATURAL SCIENCES OF PHILADELPHIA. 343 



The officei's elected for the ensuing year are : — 



Director, . . . Dr. W. S. W. Ruschenberger. 



Vice-Director, . . Thomas Meehan. 



Recorder, . . . F. Lamson Scribner. 



Cor. Secretary,-) ^ j^^^^ ^ Martindale. 



Treasurer, ) 



Conservator, . . . John H. Redfield. 



Respectfully submitted, 



Thomas Meehan, 



Vice-Director. 



Conservator'' s Report for 188^. — The Conservator has, during 

 the past year, continued to direct his attention to the care and 

 improvement of the Academy's Herbarium, so far as was com- 

 patible with the demands on his time and labor occasioned by 

 receiving, preparing and placing new accessions. With some 

 assistance from Mr. Scribner, certain portions of the North 

 American Herbarium have been mounted, mainly of genera more 

 especially needing this care, such as Viola, Polygala, Lupinus, 

 Dalea, Astragalus, Oxytropis, Potentilla, Eriogonum, and others. 

 Mr. Burk is now engaged in the work of re-arranging the North 

 American Compositse after Gray's New Synoptical Flora. In the 

 General Herbarium the provisional alphabetical lists of species 

 have been carried forward as far as Loranthaceas. These lists, 

 imperfect and defective as they are, will justify the labor expended 

 upon them, by the time saved to every one consulting the Her- 

 barium. It is hoped that this merely preliminary work will soon 

 be completed, and prepare the way for more deliberate and careful 

 elaboration by expert botanists. 



During the latter part of the summer our work had to be tem- 

 porarily suspended by the necessary preparations for receiving 

 the members of the American Association for the Advancement 

 of Science at its September meeting in this city, and the gratifi- 

 cation expressed by them on the visits to the Academy's library 

 and herbarium, for the fraternal fellowship extended by our 

 Section, is a source of satisfaction to us all. 



The donations of plants during the past year amount to 3183 

 species, of which 407 are new to our collection. In these dona- 

 tions are included three Centuries of Ellis' North American 

 Fungi, of which a large proportion are probably new to us, and 



