26 REPOET OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1903. 



Scttleinents, have already been referred to under the heading of 

 "Additions to the CoOections/' These explorations, which are carried 

 on entirely at the expense of Doctoi- Abbott, have now been in prog- 

 ress for several years, and through his generosity the National Museum 

 has been the fortunate recipient of the very large and extremely valu- 

 able collections that he has made. 



In the spring of 1903 Mr. F. A. Lucas, accompanied by Mr. William 

 Palmer and Mr. J. W. Scollick, all of the Museum staff, visited one of 

 the stations of the Cabot Steam Whaling Company on the coast of 

 Newfoundland in the interest of the St. Louis Exposition for the pur- 

 pose of securing as complete a representation as possible of a large 

 sulphur-bottom whale. He was entirely successful, returning with a 

 perfect skeleton of a specimen measuring about 78 feet long, and with 

 molds of the exterior, from which a cast of the entire animal will be 

 made. These specimens at the close of the exposition will l)e exhib- 

 ited in the Museum. 



Through the courtesy of the (jeographical Society of Baltimore, the 

 Museum was enabled to send Mr. B. A. Bean and Mr. J. H. Riley with 

 an expedition to the Bahama Islands, W' here they were to make collec- 

 tion of the fishes and land animals of that region. The party was still 

 absent at the close of the year. 



Dr. H. G. Dyar, with Mr. Rolla P. Currie, of the National Museum, 

 and Mr. A. N. Caudell, of the Department of Agriculture, accom- 

 panied an expedition to British Columbia under the auspices of the 

 Carnegie Institution, and it is expected that they will bring back a 

 large and important collection of insects. 



Mr. S. Ward Loper, of the U. S. Geological Survey, made for the 

 Museum an interesting collection of Triassic plants in Connecticut and 

 Massachusetts, and through arrangements with the Director of the 

 Survey, Hon. Charles D. Walcott, Mr. Charles Schuchert, of the 

 Museum staft', spent several weeks in Virginia and Georgia with 

 the special view of determining the geological horizons of the southern 

 part of the Appalachians. Incidental to this study he collected many 

 fossils. Several weeks were spent by Mr. R. S. Bassler in Ohio, 

 Indiana, and Kentucky collecting invertebrate fossils. A small collec- 

 tion of natural history specimens, obtained about Franz Josef Land 

 by the Baldwin-Ziegler expedition of 1902 to the Polar regions, was 

 presented to the Museum by Mr. William Ziegler. It is hoped that 

 the second expedition, now in progress under the same auspices, will 

 result in additional accessions from that little-known region. 



DISTRIBUTION AND EXCHANGE OF SPECIMENS. 



The number of specimens furnished to specialists outside of the 

 Museum for study was 12,529, almost twice as many as during the 

 previous year, while the sets of d':plicates distributed to educational 



