270 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



The endowment fund of the Museum has recently received an addition 

 of five thousand dollars from Mrs. William H. Bliss. Mrs. Bliss has been 

 elected a patron of the Museum in recognition of her gift. 



The Annual Meeting of the National Association of Audubon 

 Societies was held in the east assembly room of the Museum on Tuesday, 

 October 29, 1912. The report of the secretary and executive officer of the 

 society, Mr. T. Gilbert Pearson, showed that the association had had the 

 most successful year in its history. With an income of approximately 

 sixty thousand dollars, new protective laws had been secured and existing 

 ones enforced; wardens had been maintained on the fifty-odd bird reserva- 

 tions which have been established largely through the efforts of the associa- 

 tion, and twenty-eight thousand school children had received systematic 

 instruction in bird study. 



At the afternoon session, the association was addressed by Mrs. Alice 

 Hall Walter of Providence, Rhode Island, and by Mr. Gustave Strauben- 

 miiller, associate superintendent of schools of the Board of Education of 

 New York City, on the educational value of nature study. 



At four o'clock a public address was given in the large lecture hall by 

 Professor Homer Dill of the University of Iowa, on the birds of Laysan 

 Island in the Hawaiian Reservation. Shortly preceding Professor Dill's 

 visit to this island, the United States government had arrested twenty-three 

 Japanese poachers who were living on the island while slaughtering its birds 

 to preserve their plumage for millinery purposes. It is estimated that no 

 less than three hundred thousand albatrosses, terns, and other sea birds 

 were thus destroyed, and Professor Dill found abundant evidence of the 

 results of this destruction in acres of bleaching bones and thousands of wings 

 which were in process of preservation at the time the poachers were appre- 

 hended by the United States revenue cutter "Thetis." Professor Dill 

 learned that the poachers cut the wings from living birds which were left to 

 bleed to death, while other birds, which were too fat to be readily prepared, 

 were thrown into cisterns slowly to starve and thus reach a condition in 

 which their plumage could be more readily preserved. 



At the meeting of the Executive Committee on October 16, the following 

 persons were elected life members of the Museum in recognition of their 

 interest in the institution: Messrs. Alfred J. Klein, R. D. 0. Johnson, 

 Benjamin Strong, Jr., and Frederick Taylor. 



Henry Fairfield Osborn, as President of the American Museum of 

 Natural History, has been appointed a trustee in perpetuity of the Kahn 

 Foundation for the Foreign Travel of American Teachers. 



Dr. J. G, Knowlton has presented to the Museum a few skulls and other 

 specimens from the Eskimo of North Baffin Land. Among the latter are a 



