24 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1963 



Henry B. Washburn, Jr., Director of the Boston Museum of Science 

 William W. Whiteman, Jr., lawyer and financier, Oklahoma City 

 Eugene M. Zuckert, Secretary of the Air Force 



The Advisory Board has held two meetings, during which it selected 

 a chairman, John Nicholas Brown, adopted bylaws for its operation, 

 considered the scope and extent of the Board's fmictions, and proposed 

 areas of study. A number of potential Museum sites in the Greater 

 Washington area have been considered, and several have been examined 

 by the Advisory Board. 



FINANCES 



A statement on finances, dealing particularly with Smithsonian pri- 

 vate funds, will be found in the report of the executive committee of 

 the Board of Regents, page 261. Funds appropriated to the Institu- 

 tion for its regular operations for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1963, 

 totaled $11,060,550. Besides this direct appropriation, the Institu- 

 tion received funds by transfer from other Government agencies as 

 follows: From the District of Columbia for the National Zoological 

 Park, $1,504,997; from the National Park Service, Department of the 

 Interior, for the River Basin Surveys, $271,000. 



VISITORS 



Visitors to the Smithsonian buildings on the Mall again surpassed 

 all records with a total of 10,309,836, which was 1,386,705 more than 

 for the previous year. April 1963, with 1,720,716, was the month of 

 largest attendance; August 1962 second, with 1,616,360; July 1962 

 third, with 1,612,452. Table 1 gives a summary of the attendance 

 records for the five buildings; table 2, groups of schoolchildren. A 

 new method adopted for estimating the number of visitors at the Na- 

 tional Zoological Park showed a total of 3,200,000 for the year. When 

 this figure is added to the attendance in the Institution's buildings on 

 the Mall, and to the 1,793,500 recorded at the National Gallery of Art, 

 the total Smithsonian attendance for 1962 may be set at 15,303,336. 



REPLACEMENT OF SMITHSON PLAQUE 



In 1896 the Smithsonian Board of Regents caused to be erected a 

 handsome marble memorial to James Smithson in the English Church 

 of the Holy Ghost in Genoa, Italy, where he died on June 26, 1829. 

 During World War II the church was gutted by fire following Allied 

 bombardments and stripped of all fittings by looters. Following the 

 war the church was restored, but all trace of the Smithson cenotaph 

 had disappeared. 



It seemed appropriate and desirable that this memorial to the 

 founder of the Smithsonian Institution be replaced, and in 1960 the 

 Board of Regents so authorized. The new plaque, sculptured by Raf- 



