ADVERTISEMENT. 



The object of the General Appendix to the Aimiial Report of the 

 Smithsonian Institution is to furnish brief accounts of scientific discov- 

 ery in particuUir directions; occasional reports of the investigations 

 made by coUaborators of the Institution ; memoirs' of a general charac- 

 ter or on special topics, whether original and prepared expressly for the 

 purpose, or selected from foreign journals and proceedings ; and briefly 

 to present (as fully as space will permit) such papers not published in 

 the " Smithsonian Contributious " or in the " Miscellaneous Collections" 

 as may be supposed to be of interest or value to the numerous corre- 

 spondents of the Institution. 



It has been a prominent object of the Board of Regents of the Smith- 

 sonian Institution, from a very early date, to enrich the annual report 

 reqnired of them by law, with memoirs illustrating the more remarka- 

 ble and important developments in physical and biological discovery, 

 as well as showing the general character of the operations of the Insti- 

 tution ; and this purpose has, during the greater part of its history, been 

 carried out largely by the publication ot such papers as would i»ossess 

 an interest to all attracted by scientific progress, so that the appendices 

 of the annual reports, during the years down to 1880, have been almost 

 wholly so occupied. 



In 1880, the Secretary , induced in part by the discontinuation of an 

 annual summary of progress which for thirty years previous had been 

 issued by well-known private publishing firms, had prepared by com- 

 petent collaborators a series of abstracts, showing concisely the ])romi- 

 neiitfeatures of recent scientific progress in astronomy, geology, meteor- 

 ology, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, botany, zoology, and anthropol- 

 ogy. Other subjects which might properly have been included, such as 

 those of terrestrial physics, hydrogra{)hy, microscopy, etc., as well as 

 the more practical topics of general technology, were omitted, both for 

 want of time and want of space, so that from the outset the impractica- 

 bility of a review of the whole field was recognized. 



It has already been mentioned in the annual report for 1888 that these 

 latter provisions seemed justified by further experience until in 188C, 

 the incompleteness of the si)ecial record, the discouragements from the 

 increasing delays encountered in the printing of these summaries, the 

 recent multiplication by private enterprise of special books and periodi- 



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