REPORT OF ASSISTANT SECRETARY. 11 



minute details of case architecture and fittings. His official connec- 

 tion with nearly all the important expositions of the past quarter of a 

 century and his exhaustive studies of all the principal museums of 

 Europe and the United States gave him exceptional opportunities for 

 observation and experiment. Though a young man when he died, none 

 other had acquired so ripe an experience and none is more worthy 

 of being followed. 



An incidental though very popular educational feature of the 

 Museum, having for its purpose the promotion of scientific teaching 

 throughout tin 1 country, has been the distribution to schools and col- 

 leges of its duplicate specimens, properly identified and labeled, and 

 put up in carefully selected sets. Inadequate means have prevented 

 this measure from being carried out on the scale which the resources 

 of the Museum would admit of, but many hundreds of such sets have 

 already been given away. 



Scarcely a year passes that some exposition, either at home or 

 abroad, is not occupying the attention of the Museum, and through 

 this means its existence and aims are brought constantly and promi- 

 nently before the public. These expositions have of late followed one 

 another so closely and have required so extensive preparations as to 

 interfere greatly with the ordinary work of the Museum, but the 

 practice of introducing new and varied features, of showing a fresh 

 series of objects or improved groupings in connection with each one, 

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

 ington, besides fulfilling the important function of making museum 

 methods known to the people of the United States and stimulating 

 the growth of museums in many quarters. 



Though mainly technical and most useful to the investigator, the 

 publications of the Museum can be classed, in a general way, as belong- 

 ing to its educational side, being the medium through which the nature 

 and extent of its collections are made known. The Annual Report, 

 first printed as a separate volume of the Smithsonian Report in L884, 

 and now in its eighteenth volume, consists, besides the administrative 

 part, mainly of semipopular papers on interesting portions of the col- 

 lections. The Proceedings and Bulletins are almost exclusively tech- 

 nical, the shorter papers being assigned to the former and the larger 

 and more exhaustive works to the latter. Of the Proceedings twenty- 

 two complete volumes have been issued and of the Bulletins fifty 

 numbers. 



PRESENT CONDITIONS AND NEEDS. 



Attention has repeatedly been called to the inadequacy of the pres- 

 ent accommodations for the national collections. The Smithsonian 

 building had become fully occupied some twenty-five years ago. when 

 the large contributions to the Government from exhibitors at the 



