10 CARNEGIE INSTITUTION OF WASHINGTON. 



income of any single organization, they must be so left. He stood 

 firmly in opposition to all of the numerous plans suggested to the 

 Institution for distribution of its income amongst educational, elee- 

 mosynary, governmental, and other organizations; and in opposi- 

 tion likewise to the still more numerous plans for dissipation of that 

 income among a multitude of minor projects whose consummation 

 could be better attained under other auspices. He thus rendered 

 invaluable services during this formative period, when the Institu- 

 tion and its administration have been, properly enough in the inter- 

 ests of society, on trial, and when the only privilege it could claim 

 was that of demonstrating a right to existence. But whatever may 

 be the verdict of our successors with respect to this period, or how- 

 ever opinions of contemporaries may differ in respect to the actual 

 development of the Institution, the independence, the fearlessness, 

 the integrity, and the fidelity of Dr. Billings as a Trustee must stand 

 forth as ideal characteristics of those altruistic and zealous individ- 

 uals who lead the way to the enlightenment and to the advancement 

 of our race. 



The Institution has lost also during the past fiscal year another 

 veteran colleague, who was long associated with Dr. Billings in the 

 promotion of medical science, by the death on November 8, 1912, of 

 Dr. Robert Fletcher, editor-in-chief of the Index Medicus since its 

 publication was resumed bj^ the Institution in 1903. A singular 

 series of circumstances led up to the intimate association and warm 

 friendship of these veterans. Each of them was educated for the 

 profession of physician, each of them entered the United States 

 Army as a volunteer surgeon at the beginning of the Civil War, each 

 of them won honors "for faithful and meritorious services" at the 

 front, and each of them later withdrew from active practice of his 

 profession to enter upon more important life-work in the interests 

 of medical science. Dr. Fletcher came into close cooperation with 

 Dr. Billings in 1876, when the work of building up the Library of 

 the Surgeon General's Office in Washington was begun. From a 

 nucleus of a few hundred volumes at that time, this library has now 

 come to contain more than a half miUion volumes of books and 

 pamphlets. But in addition to this great work in which these men 

 were so long associated, Billings had already projected the greater 

 work of an index catalogue of existing medical literature and of a 

 current catalogue for future additions to such literature. In these 

 arduous enterprises Dr. Fletcher was chief coadjutor, and his con- 

 tinuous devotion to their editorial supervision during nearly four 

 decades, extending almost to the day of his death in his ninetieth 



