12 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1900. 



prominentl}' before the public. These expositions have of late fol- 

 lowed one another so closely and have required so extensive prepara- 

 tion as to interfere greatly with the legitimate work of the Museum, 

 but the practice of introducing new and varied features, of showing a 

 fresh series of objects or improved groupings in coimection with each 

 one, insures a substantial gain, as the collections are returned to Wash- 

 ington, besides fultilling the important function of making museum 

 methods known to the people of the United States and stimulating the 

 growth of museums in many quarters. 



The publications of the Museum may be classed, at least in a gen- 

 eral waj^ as belonging to its educational side, though they are mainly 

 technical, and in that respect most useful to the investigator. They 

 spread the work of the Museum abroad and make known the nature 

 and extent of its collections. The Annual Report was first printed as 

 a separate volume of the Smithsonian Report in 1884, and has just 

 reached its seventeenth volume. Besides the administrative part, it has 

 consisted mainly of semipopular papers on interesting portions of the 

 collection. Of the Proceedings, made up of technical papers of small 

 to moderate size, twenty-one volumes have been issued and another is 

 in press. The Bulletins, reserved chiefly for the larger and more 

 exhaustive scientific papers, number forty-nine, of which the last one 

 printed (Bulletin 17), a monograph of the fishes of North and Middle 

 America, is in four parts, completed near the close of the year. 



PRESSING NEEDS OF THE MUSEUTVI. 



By 1883, only two years after possession had been taken of the 

 present Museum building, its capacity was found to be wholly insuffi- 

 cient, and an estimate for a second structure of even larger size was 

 at once submitted to Congress. In his report for 1881, Doctor Goode 

 explained that it was a serious problem where to store the incoming 

 collections, leaving entirely out of consideration the question of their 

 display. The needs in this direction, always increasing, have been 

 urged in every subsequent report, but so far without efl^'ective result. 

 The Senate voted $500,000 for a new building in 1888, and again in 

 1890, 1892, and 1896, but all these measures failed of action in the 

 House. 



The Museum has now reached a crisis in its histor}^ which must be 

 frankly met. It can no longer comply with the mandates of Congress 

 imposed upon it by the act of 1846 establishing the Smithsonian Insti- 

 tution. The two buildings which it occupies are overcrowded to the 

 extent that the collections they contain can only in part be arranged 

 and classified so as to permit of their examination as required by 

 law, and many of the collections are so inaccessible as to endanger 

 their very safety. Many hundreds of boxes, to a large extent turned 

 over by the Government surveys and filled with material valued at 



