370 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1880. 



Accession 21620, a large collection from the Mediterranean ; exchange from Royal 

 Zoological Museum, Florence, Italy. 



Accession 21651, a collection of fishes, principally Selachians, from Australia; ex- 

 change from the Australian Museum, Sidney. 



Accession 21752, types of new species, Gobius townsendi and Lepidogobius gilberti, 

 collected at San Diego, California, hy C. H. Eigenmann. 



Large arid valuable collections have been received from the U. S. 

 Fish Commission, made by Prof. D. S. Jordan and party in Virginia, 

 North Carolina, and Tennessee. 



The routine work has consisted, for the most part, in receiving and 

 caring for accessions, preparing papers for publication, attending to 

 correspondence, bottling, labeling, and preserving the collections. 

 Some attention has been shown students of ichthyology from this and 

 other cities. The duties of the Curator, as Ichthyologist and Editor 

 of the Fish Commission, have been such as to allow little time for Mu- 

 seum work during this year. 



Exchanges have been made with the Otago University, New Zealand, 

 and the Australian Museum, Sydney. 



The state of the collection has been improved; numbers of specimens 

 have been transferred from tanks to jars, thereby insuring their better 

 preservation. 



The number of specimens added to this department during the year 

 was about G,000. There are at least 25,000 duplicate specimens, 60,000 

 reserve specimens, and 30,000 specimens in the exhibition series. A 

 collection of this magnitude is very difficult to handle and care for. 

 The case and shelf room is inadequate, making it necessary to stand 

 the jars containing the specimens upon the floor, thereby causing much 

 extra labor and confusion. 



