REPORT OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY. 



57 



Considerable progress has been made in recording, determining, 

 and invoicing the other collections in the Institution, apart from those 

 brought from the Patent Office. The mammals, North American 

 birds and their eggs, the osteological collection, and the North Ameri- 

 can lizards, are at present so well posted up that the number of species 

 represented in the different series, with the aggregate number in each 

 series, the locality, donor, and other incidents of all the specimens of 

 each can be shown at a glance. Nearly all the North American 

 reptiles, other than saurians, are entered, and many of them deter- 

 mined ; and the same may be said of the western fishes. The follow- 

 ing table will show how much of this labor of recording has been 

 done in 1858. 



Table exhibiting the entries in the record books of the Smithsonian 

 museum in 1858, in continuation of previous years. 



The actual number of entries during the year amounts to 9,348, 

 being the difference between the aggregates of 1858 and 1857. As 

 most of these, however, have been made at least twice in the record 

 book and on the invoices, the total is nearer 18,000. 



From the preceding table it will be seen that the entries already 

 exceed twenty-five thousand. In the case of alcoholic series, how- 

 ever, each bottle, though containing only one species from one locality, 

 may, and almost always does, include more than one specimen, the 

 average being at least five, which would give to the reptiles and fishes 

 an addition of 22,024 pieces, which would bring the number of regis- 

 tered specimens nearly to forty-eight thousand. This is, lioweverj 

 far from expressing the full statistics of the collection, as there are 

 at least ten thousand jars of alcoholic specimens not yet entered, to 

 say nothing of the exotic birds and other objects. 



During the year the determination of the North American birds in 

 the (Smithsonian collection has been completed, and the results pre- 

 sented by myself in the ninth volume of the reports of the Pacific 

 railroad survey, occupying over a thousand quarto pages. The de- 

 scription of each species is followed by a list of all the specimens in 

 the collection, with an indication of the locality, collector, date, and 

 other details, and the report in question thus serves as a catalogue of 

 the ornithological collections of the Institution, as the previous volume 

 (eighth) did of its North American mammals. From this report it 



