8 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1952 



annually and serves to safeguard the tremendously valuable materials 

 in our collections that by law are our responsibility. 



MARY VAUX WALCOTT FUND FOR PUBLICATIONS IN BOTANY 



Acting upon a proposal by the Secretary, the executive committee 

 of the Board of Regents during the year authorized the establishment 

 of the Mary Vaux Walcott Fund for Publications in Botany. This 

 fund, amounting to $60,000, is derived from the sales of "North Amer- 

 ican "Wild Flowers," the 5- volume quarto portfolio of 400 water-color 

 plates of wild flowers painted from nature by Mrs. Charles D. Walcott. 

 The plates were reproduced in color by a special process and were pub- 

 lished under her supervision and generous subsidy. A large number 

 of sets of the plates have been sold by the Institution in the 27 years 

 since their publication, and it seems especially fitting that the income 

 from the proceeds of their sale should now be used for publication by 

 the Smithsonian of contributions to the science of botany, in which 

 Mrs. Walcott had a deep interest. It is planned that the publications 

 issued under this fund will be principally technical in nature and will 

 relate to the researches of the United States National Herbarium. 

 They will appear from time to time in the Smithsonian Miscellaneous 

 Collections. 



SUMMARY OF THE YEAR'S ACTIVITIES OF THE BRANCHES OF THE 



INSTITUTION 



National Museum. — More than 607,000 specimens, twice as many as 

 last year, were received and distributed among the Museum's six de- 

 partments, bringing the total catalog entries to 33,184,494. Some of 

 the year's more noteworthy accessions included : In anthropology, an 

 eighteenth-century wampum belt of the Wyandot Indians, a collection 

 of Javanese puppets, and 78 Indian skeletons from burial sites on 

 Buggs Island in the Roanoke River, Va. ; in zoology, important mam- 

 mals from Borneo, Alaska, and the United States, birds from Colom- 

 bia and Panama, reptiles and amphibians from Egypt and Borneo, 

 and large collections of lishes, insects, marine invertebrates, and mol- 

 lusks from many parts of the world ; in botany, gifts of plants espe- 

 cially from Honduras, Colombia, Peru, Ryukyu Islands, Florida, and 

 Canada, and many others received in exchanges with other institu- 

 tions; in geology, five minerals heretofore unrepresented in the min- 

 eralogical collections, a collection of 250,000 fresh-water Mesozoic and 

 Cenozoic mollusks, and vertebrate fossils from Washington, Montana, 

 Wyoming, South Dakota, and North Dakota ; in engineering and in- 

 dustries, a fanning mill used in West Virginia about 75 years ago, a 

 corn planter of about 1860, an 1878 oil engine, a collection of early 

 radio apparatus, and a series of stones and prints illustrating the mak- 



