28 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1906. 
Agriculture, and described by him under the name Simbos terrelli; 
part of the skull of a fossil ruminant from the Pleistocene of Zuni, 
New Mexico, presented by the Department of the Interior, and 
described and figured by Mr. Gidley, of the Museum, as Lissops zunt- 
ensis, and a small collection of fossil reptiles from the Permian of 
Brazil. 
Of the accessions in the division of paleobotany the most important 
were as follows: Several thousand specimens of Mesozoic plants, 
being the material described by Ward, Fontaine, Bibbins, and Wie- 
land in Monograph No. XLVIII of the Geological Survey; sev- 
eral hundred examples of fossil wood and plants from the Permo- 
Carboniferous of Sao Paulo and Santa Catherina, Brazil, collected by 
Mr. I. C. White, and 250 specimens of fossil plants from the Judith 
River beds of the Upper Cretaceous of Montana, collected in 1903 by 
Mr. T. W. Stanton and Mr. J. B. Hatcher, and described in Bulletin 
No. 257 of the Geological Survey. 
GENERAL WORK ON THE COLLECTIONS. is 
The primary duty with which the Museum staff is charged is the 
care, recording, and arrangement of the immense collections, which 
have lately been increasing at the rate of nearly a quarter of a million 
specimens annually. This work, laborious under the best conditions, 
is made especially difficult by the crowded condition of the buildings, 
the inconvenient location of most of the workrooms, and the fact that 
the bulk of all the material received must now be packed away fora 
time in inaccessible storage quarters. The safety of specimens is never 
secured by simply finding a place for them. They must be under con- 
stant surveillance, for otherwise they are certain to deteriorate and 
eventually to become valueless. It is, therefore, not only the recent 
accessions which require attention, but every collection received from 
the very first that came into the possession of the Museum. Only a 
general review of the work*of the past year is given here. 
In the division of physical anthropology much time was spent in 
placing the older material, mainly skulls and skeletons, in proper 
museum order, and in attending to the preparation and preservation of 
current accessions. This involved the cleaning, identification, cata- 
loging, and arrangement of a large number of specimens, and at the 
close of the year the entire collection was in as perfect condition as 
the limited facilities permitted. Some improvements were also made 
in the accommodations of the laboratory. 
The numbering and card cataloging of the extensive ethnological 
collections, mainly from the Philippines, obtained at the Louisiana 
Purchase Exposition in 1905, were completed and the objects arranged 
in storage drawers in the Museum building. In order to make more 
