REPORT ON NATIONAL MUSEUM. 189 



in the southwest court. The curator of this department has recently 

 undertaken the development of the collections in physical geology, but 

 has not yet had opportunity to seriously begin work. The laboratory 

 has been supplied with some important pieces of apparatus during the 

 year, notably a machine for sawing rocks, made by B. T. Jenks, of Mid- 

 dleborough, Mass. The saw-blade is simply a thin plate of soft iron, 

 which swings back and forth across the stone and is fed with wet emery 

 or sand. Besides this, has been furnished a small diamond circular saw 

 for cutting thin sections of rock. This was made by Kerr, of Provi- 

 dence, R. L, and set up by Mr. Jenks. Ensign J. H. Fillmore, U. S. K, 

 is now attached to this department. 



XVIII. Department of Metallurgy and Economic Geology. 



Mr. Frederick P. Dewey has been appointed full curator in this de- 

 partment. Until within a few weeks nothing had been done towards de- 

 veloping the exhibition series, the time of the curator and his assistant 

 having been devoted to overhauling and cataloguing a portion of the 

 great mass of unassorted metallurgical material acquired by the museum 

 at the close of the Philadelphia Exhibition. There is still an immense 

 quantity of ores and metallurgical products stored away in the original 

 packing boxes within the Museum building, and also in a temporary shed 

 attached to the Armory building. This latter was obtained by Mr. 

 Thomas Donaldson at the close of the so-called "permanent exhibition" 

 on the Centennial grounds in Philadelphia. Work in this department, 

 as in that of minerals and lithology, has been very much trammeled by 

 the fact that until very recently there have been no full curators in the 

 division of geology. This deficiency having now been supplied, the 

 work in these three departments is rapidly progressing, and during 1884 

 the inorganic collections will undoubtedly begin to assume the import- 

 ance which they deserve on account of the wealth of the material already 

 in the possession of the Museum. 



DIVISION OF EXPLORATION AND EXPERIMENT. 



XIX. Department of Exploration and Field work. 



Very much has been accomplished in this department ; not, however, 

 by the direct efforts of the Museum, whose appropriations cannot be ap- 

 plied to this purpose, but through the efforts of the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution and its Bureau of Ethnology, the Fish Commission, the Geological 

 Survey, and also through the valuable assistance of the U. S. Signal 

 Service and the U. S. Navy. Mr. Pierre L. Jouy, of the Museum staff, 

 has been for some years in China and Japan, and recently, at the ex- 

 pense of the Institution, has been attached to the embassy in Corea, 

 where he is making mineralogical and ethnological collections in the 

 vicinity of Seoul. Ensign J. B. Bernadou, U. S. K, having volunteered 



