REPORT OF TnE SECRETARY. 53 



increased before the publication of the Miiseiiui report for Mie year, in 

 wliicli a complete tabulated statement will be given. 



The registrar states that 12,400 boxes and packages were received 

 during the year and entered upon the transportation records of the 

 Smithsonian Institution. In this number are included 1,482 " accession 

 lots" for the Museum. 



Many valuable contributions have been made, as in past years, through 

 the friendly co-operation of the Departments and Bureaus of the Gov- 

 ernment and of officers of the Army and Navy. For this assistance the 

 sincere thanks of the Museum are tendered. The geographical index 

 to the "list of accessions," which will be published in the report of the 

 assistant secretary in charge of the Museum, will show the sources of 

 the material received during the year. Among the most important 

 accessions are the following : A collection of old coins, chiefly Eoman, 

 deposited by Mr. Thomas Wilson ; a collection of archaeological and 

 ethnographical specimens bequeathed to the Museum by Dr. Charles 

 Eau ; the Lea collection of shells and minerals presented during Pro- 

 fessor Baird's life-time, but not received until this year ; ethnological 

 objects from Egypt, presented by Dr. James Grant Bey, and from the 

 Congo region, by Lieut. E. H. Taunt, U. S. ]S"avy ; a collection of birds from 

 Central America and islands in the Caribbean Sea, collected by Mr. 

 Charles H. Townsend ; a pair of living bufi'aloes presented by Mr. E. G. 

 Blackford ; a skin of an unusually large moose, purchased from Mr. A. 

 B. Douglas; the first cast made in the mold taken from the living face 

 of Abraham Lincoln, by Leonard Volk, in 1860; also the first casta 

 made in the molds from Lincoln's hands, and the first bronze cast of 

 the face mold, and bronze casts of the hands presented to the Govern- 

 ment of the United States, for deposit in the Museum, by thirty-three 

 subscribers, through a committee composed of Thomas B. Clarke, Au- 

 gustus St. Gaudens, Richard Watson Gilder, and Erwin Davis; Indian 

 pottery from the pueblos of the Jemez Valley, in I^ew Mexico, collected 

 by Col. James Stevenson, of the Bureau of Ethnology; a collection of 

 bird eggs from Lieut. H. C. Benson, U. S. Army, and from Dr. J. C. Mer- 

 rill, U. S. Army ; a collection of reptiles and batrachians from Dr. R. Ells- 

 worth Call; extensive collections of fishes and marine invertebrates, 

 collected by the L^. S. Fish Commission ; a large collection of Syrphid;e 

 from Dr. S. W. Williston, forming the types of Bulletin 31 of the Na- 

 tional Museum ; a valuable series of paleozoic fossils from the New 

 York State Museum of Natural History; a series of fossil plants, sev- 

 eral of them new to science, from the coal-measures of Alabama, pre- 

 sented by Prof. I. C. Russell, of the U. S. Geological Survey ; a large 

 collection of eruptive, metamorphie, and sedimentary rocks from Colo- 

 rado, collected by Dr. S. F. Emmons, of the TJ. S. Geological Survey ; an 

 extensive series of rocks, collected by Mr. G. P. INIerrill in Now Jersey, 

 Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Maine; a very interesting series of 

 aluminum bronzes and other rare alloys, made by Bierman, of Hanover, 



