REPORT OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY. 39 



D. Walcott, and the ligurinl specimon.s, 158 in nuuibcn', of Lower Cre- 

 taceous grvphtieas, described by Messrs. Hill and Vaughan in Bulletin 

 No. 151 of the Geolog'ical Survey. A collection coniprisino- .some 

 4,000 specimens of Cincinnati fossils was purchased from Mr. II. E. 

 Dickhaut, of the Survey. This collection is particularly rich in 

 pelccypods. 



Three vahiable collections of post-Paleozoic fossils were received in 

 exchange from the Geological Museum at Ley den, the University 

 Museum of Natural History at Turin, Italy, and the British Museum 

 of Natural History, London. 



As a matter of historical interest, it may be noted that the Troost 

 collection of crinoidea, which, together with the manuscript describing 

 them and drawings for 107 species, was sent by the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution to Prof. James Hall in 1853, was returned last November by 

 the administrator of the Hall estate. 



The Section of Paleobotany, until the opening of the present fiscal 

 year, has been in charge of honorary curators. In order to relieve 

 them of the detailed routine work Dr. A. C. Peale was appointed aid 

 and placed in charge of the collections. Much of the work which he 

 has had to do has been upon material which has been in the Museum 

 collections for many years. The comparatively small number of 

 accessions, therefore, furnishes by no means a measure of the work 

 performed. Among the principal collections which have been received 

 by this section during the fiscal year were: Lower Carboniferous 

 plants from Henry County, Missouri, described in Monograph 37 of 

 the Geological Survey; a series of 900 Carboniferous plants from 

 Indian Territory, described by Mr. David White in the Nineteenth 

 Annual Report of the Survey, and 26 boxes of Carboniferous plants, 

 comprising the Armstrong collection, purchased for the Museum by 

 Mr. R. D. Lacoe. 



PRESENT CONDITION OF COLLECTIONS 



The progress made in caring for the collections has been all that the 

 circumstances permitted. In the Section of Applied Geology the 

 work of installing the systematic series of nonmetallic products in 

 the new rail cases has been nearly completed. The rearrangement of 

 the geographic series on the ground floor of the Southwest C'ourt is 

 also completed, although several thousand labels yet remain to be pre- 

 pared. The entire collection of building and ornamental stones, 

 comprising between 3,000 and 4,000 specimens, has been moved and 

 installed in the wall cases of the same court. 



The collections in systematic geology, occupying the West South 

 Range, are not yet fully arranged, though the series illustrating the 

 materials of the earth's crust is in order, as is also that illustrating 

 folding and faulting and volcanic products. A magnificent group of 



