REPORT OF THE SECRETARY OF THE 

 SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION 



C. G. ABBOT 



FOR THE YEAR ENDED JUNE 30, 1942 



To the Board of Regents of the Smithsoman Institution. 



Gentlemen : I have the honor to submit herewith my report show- 

 ing the activities and condition of the Smithsonian Institution and the 

 Government bureaus under its administrative charge during the fiscal 

 year ended June 30, 1942. The first 23 pages contain a summary 

 account of the affairs of the Institution, and appendixes 1 to 11 

 give more detailed reports of the operations of the National Museum, 

 the National Gallery of Art, the National Collection of Fine Arts, the 

 Freer Gallery of Art, the Bureau of American Ethnology, the Inter- 

 national Exchanges, the National Zoological Park, the Astrophysical 

 Observatory, which now includes the Division of Radiation and 

 Organisms, the Smithsonian library, and of the publications issued 

 under the direction of the Institution. On page 99 is the financial 

 report of the executive committee of the Board of Regents. 



THE SMITHSONIAN AND THE WAR 



In my last report I stated that in the fiscal year 1941 the Smithson- 

 ian had been assigned several problems connected with national 

 defense and stood ready to devote all its resources to such work when 

 called upon. After Pearl Harbor, calls upon the Institution for 

 special information relating to the war increased rapidly, and early in 

 1942 I appointed a War Committee for the purpose of exploiting 

 every facility of the Institution in aiding the war effort. Such a 

 highly specialized organization as the Smithsonian obviously can only 

 undertake those things which its staff is trained and equipped to do, 

 but the exploratory investigations of the War Committee revealed 

 a surprisingly wide range of activities in which the Institution could 

 engage that are directly or indirectly of real service in the war effort. 



For some organizations whose normal activities are in fields directly 

 applicable to war work, such for example as those concerned with 

 strategic materials or those with large physical laboratories, the prob- 

 lem of going over to a war footing is solved for them. For such 



