REPORT OF THE SECRETARY. 41 



ceived at once tlie great iiiconvcnieiice wliicli this arraiijjement would 

 cause to tlie department oi" fossil plants. The collections of fossil plants 

 were largely undetermined, and required to be studied ;ind identified. 

 Most of them were from recent formations, and represented types of veg- 

 etation still living, requiring constant comparison with the recent forms 

 to be seen in herbaria. Even the installation and care of those that were 

 named necessitated such comparison, and the difficulties of this nature 

 that were encountered were very great. It was rarely possible to carry 

 the fossils to the Department of Agriculture, and as it was usually 

 necessary to search through large families of ])lant8, the temporary 

 transportation of the botanical specimens was still more impracticable. 

 1 therefore early began to urge the establishment at the Museum of a 

 permanent collection of the j^lants still growing in America and other 

 countries where the analogues of fossil plants were likely to occur. 

 While I am highly gratified at the progress in this direction already 

 made, as reported above, it must however be evident that only a begin- 

 ning has thus far been made, and that the jiresent collection of living 

 plants is still very inadequate. The Joad collection represents chiefly 

 the flora of Southern Europe, which is widely different from all Tertiary 

 floras, and especially so from the Cretaceous and Tertiary floras of North 

 America. The collections that I have made are exclusively American, 

 and, so far as they go, are valuable aids to the study of American fossil 

 plants, but they are, of course, too limited in extent to be trusted in 

 critical cases. The parts of the world next after those in North Ameri- 

 ca with which our fossil floras most closely agree, are Eastern Asia, the 

 East Indies, Australia, and South Africa, and from all these vast re- 

 gions scarcely any representatives are to be found in the present her- 

 barium of the National Museum. It is therefore highly desirable, as a 

 necessary adjunct to the department of fossil plants, and aside from 

 the still greater desideratum of establishing a truly national herbarium 

 at the Museum, that all reasonable efforts be made to enlarge and en- 

 rich the botanical collections." 



The technical botanical work of the department has been intrusted to 

 Mr. Frank H. Knowlton, who in addition to identifying and installing 

 the material, has devoted much time to bibliographical research, and to 

 the development of the sectional library. Very large collections have 

 been made by Mr. A. L. Schott during the spring and summer nnmths 

 from the parks and gardens of the city. These collections are designed 

 primarily to aid in the preparation of a catalogue of the ornamental plants 

 of Washington, but while serving this purpose, they are at the same time 

 valuable accessions to the herbarium and highly useful in connection 

 with the study of fossil plants. In collecting and preserving these speci- 

 mens Mr. Schott has shown great industry ami skill. In addition to 

 this work Mr. Schott has undertaken the preparation of a check-list of 

 genera from the "GeneraPlantarum" of Bentham and Hooker, of which 

 about half the manuscript was completed at the end of June. The time 

 of the curator was almost exclusively spent in the study and determina- 

 tion of fossil i»]ants collected by himself, and over one hundred species, 

 many of which are new, were identified and will be duly incorporated 

 ill the Museum collections. 



