410 ANNUAL REfORT SMlTSSOlflAN INSTITUTION, 192 8 



Survey has been, from the first, cared for in the National Museum, 

 one of the branches of the Smithsonian. Finally the Smithsonian 

 Institution, by directing its efforts into fields related to those covered 

 by the work of the Biological Survey, but lying outside of the ter- 

 ritory in which the Survey could operate, has provided the material 

 for the better understanding of the mammals of North America in 

 their relationship to those of the world at large. 



We have now gained a general idea of the relation of mammalogy 

 to human welfare, of what it is, how it is carried on and what the 

 course of its history has been. The question remains: What of its 

 future, particularly as this future concerns the Smithsonian Institu- 

 tion? To obtain its best and most rapid development and to con- 

 tribute most adequately to the general advance of learning, the 

 study of mammalogy should now be carried on in accordance with 

 definitely thought out plans and in full cooperation with paleon- 

 tology and physical anthropology, the two branches of research 

 most nearly related to it, branches which would merge with it in 

 an ideal system. This cooperation will in the end become necessary, 

 for the obvious reason that the underlying aim of all three is exactly 

 the same — the acquirement of systematic knowledge about mam- 

 mals — and an adjustment of results to a common standard must 

 sometime be made. At present we are applying one set of criteria to 

 the study of mammals preserved as skins, skeletons, or pickles, 

 another set to those preserved in rocks, and a third to those with 

 which we come in social contact. As a result the anomalies exist 

 that no attempt to determine the status of the races of men has 

 ever been made by anyone intimately acquainted with modern study 

 of kindred problems in mammals at large, and that the opinions re- 

 garding generic, specific, and subspecific distinctions held by workers 

 on fossil mammals are, on the whole, incommensurate with those 

 which are being applied to the study of the living kinds. The 

 standards worked out in the field of mammalogy, in the restricted 

 sense of the word, are the ones which seem likely in the end to pre- 

 vail, because these standards have been established on the basis of the 

 most complete and varied mass of information, — recent mammals, 

 in the present state of our knowledge, being more numerous and 

 more available for study than their fossil relatives, while man, 

 zoologically speaking, is an insignificant unit in the class to which 

 he belongs. Coordination of effort, in the sense that the workers in 

 these three fields should recognize their common interests and should 

 freely use each other's results, is not only desirable but inevitable. 

 Too strict a division of labor among^ different museums mio-ht. how- 



