162 REPORT ON NATIONAL MUSEUM. 



REPORT OF THE ASSISTANT DIRECTOR. 



During the year the officers of the Museum have continued the work of 

 rearranging the materials under their charge in the greatly extended 

 space afforded by the completion of the new building. It will be re- 

 membered that this building was first occupied late in 1881 ; and that 

 1883 is really, therefore, only the second year of systematic effort. Some 

 experiments in installation were made in 1881, but the chief thing ac- 

 complished was the accumulation, in some of the inner courts of the 

 building, of a great mass of unclassified material which had been gath- 

 ering for many years in the various store-rooms of the Smithsonian build- 

 ing and elsewhere, and which, on account of lack of space, had for the 

 most part been allowed to remain in the original packing cases. 



After a struggle of twenty-four months with this mass of unassorted 

 material, the floors of the Museum have been almost cleared, and at 

 present only three of the seventeen exhibition halls are occupied for 

 storage purposes, viz : The southwest court, which is still full of speci- 

 mens belonging to the departments of metallurgy, mineralogy, and 

 lithology; the southeast court, which is used as a general receptacle 

 for empty cases and unmounted material belonging to the departments 

 of zoology and anthropology; and the northeast court, which has been 

 temporarily given up to the uses of the Geological Survey and the 

 Bureau of Ethnology. 



A provisional assignment of exhibition space has been made as fol. 

 lows: North Hall, the historical collections and costumes; east Hall and 

 west Hall, general collections in ethnology and art and industry; south 

 Hall, collection of mammals; east north range, fisheries collections; 

 north east range, collection of models of boats and other appliances of 

 transportation; south-east range, sculpture and architecture; east-south 

 range, the osteological collections, the table cases in the west half of the 

 room being temporarily occupied by storage cases for fossil plants and 

 invertebrates; the eastern end of the west south range-, mineralogy; its 

 western end, lithology and physical geology; south-west range, metal- 

 lurgy and economic geology; the southern end of north-west range, the 

 collections of materia medica; its northern end, the collection of foods 

 aud pigments, &c. The west north range is used for a lecture-room and 

 hall for the meetings of societies, and also for the temporary exhibition 

 of recent accessions to the collections. The inner courts, being used as 

 work-rooms, are as yet unassigned, save the northwest court, which is 

 devoted to North American pottery. 



In the Smithsonian building the four main exhibition halls are as- 

 signed as follows: Main hall, ornithology ; upper main hall, prehistoric 

 archaeology; west range, ichthyology ; west hall, marine invertebrates. 

 These assignments are entirely provisional, and, indeed, the separation 

 of the material belonging to the different departments is not yet entirely 

 accomplished, ' 



