MrSEUM NOTES 



167 



Metropolitan Museum of Art and will appre- 

 ciate the opportunity of seeing his paintings 

 and drawings, which have never before been 

 placed on view. 



In connection with its work with the blind 

 the Museum has prepared twelve globes to 

 be loaned to the public schools in which 

 blind children are taught. These globes were 

 prepared in consultation with the late Ger- 

 trude E. Bingham, supervisor of classes for 

 the bhnd in New York City. They are 

 twenty-six inches in diameter and show the 

 land masses in rehef. The expense of the 

 preparation of the globes was met by the Jon- 

 athan Thorne Memorial Fund for the bUnd. 



Dr. Ralph W. Tower will lecture in the 

 Summer School of Columbia University on 

 '' Bibliography of Natural History Subjects" 

 and the "Administration of a Special Li- 

 brary." 



At the meeting of the American Ethno- 

 logical Society to be held at the American 

 Museum on April 30, Professor Franz 

 Boas will read a paper on "Indian Mytholo- 

 gies of Alaska and Northern British Colum- 

 bia." 



A GROUP representing a number of deep- 

 sea luminous fishes has just been completed 

 in the Museum and opened to the public. 

 It represents ten species of fishes found in 

 profound depths of the sea, half a mile or 

 more from the surface. Some of the fishes 

 are provided with rows of luminous organs 

 or with headlights, while others have a light 

 at the end of a tentacle with which to attract 

 their prey. The group is illuminated by 

 electricity in such a way that the fishes may 

 be viewed first as synoptic specimens in a 

 case and secondly, as if they were living fishes 

 swimming in the darkness of the deep sea, 

 lighted only by their own luminous or phos- 

 phorescent organs. A more detailed account 

 of the group with illustrations will be given 

 in a later issue of the Journal. 



The first of a series of Monographs of the 

 Pacific Cetacea by Mr., Roy C. Andrews has 

 just been pubUshed in the Memoirs of the 

 American Museum of Natural History (new 

 series, vol. 1, part v). This monograph is de- 

 voted to the California gray whale {Rhachia- 

 nectes glaucus Cope), which previous to Mr. 



Andrews' researches was little known, the 

 knowledge of its habits and external anatomy 

 resting almost exclusively upon the observa- 

 tions made by Captain C. M. Scammon 

 nearly forty years ago. Soon after the pub- 

 hcation of Captain Scammon's Marine 

 Mammalia in 1874, the gray whale industry 

 began to decline because of the rapid extermi- 

 nation of the species by hunters, and for the 

 last twenty years the gray whale has been 

 lost to science and many naturalists believed 

 it to be extinct. 



It was while studying cetaceans upon the 

 coast of Japan in 1910 that Mr. Andrews 

 learned from a whaling company there of 

 the existence of an animal known as the 

 "devil-fish" on the southeastern coast of 

 Korea. From the descriptions given, he 

 beUeved the animal to be the lost California 

 gray whale and returned to the Orient in 

 1911 for the purpose of studying the species 

 during the winter fishing season. In that 

 winter more than fifty specimens were taken, 

 from which it was possible to make careful 

 observations of the habits and external char- 

 acters. Skeletons of two adults were secured, 

 one of which is now in the American Museum 

 and the other in the United States National 

 Museum in Washington. These are the only 

 complete specimens of this species in the 

 world. The California gray whale is on the 

 whole one of the most remarkable of primi- 

 tive and existing baleen cetaceans and might 

 be called a "living fossil" — yet the work 

 which Mr. Andrews has done has been prac- 

 tically in an untouched field. 



In the monographs which are to follow, 

 Mr. Andrews will endeavor to show whether 

 or not the species of whale occurring in the 

 Atlantic and Pacific Oceans are synonymous. 

 Many cetologists beheve that almost all of 

 the large whales are cosmopolitan in distribu- 

 tion. This has not been demonstrated be- 

 cause of lack of material, which fortunately 

 the American Museum now possesses. 



Two remarkable new fossil mammals are 

 among the rarities of the collections recently 

 obtained from the Lower Eocene of Wyoming. 

 One is a tiny relative of the Notoungulata, 

 an order of extinct Tertiary hoofed animals 

 never found hitherto outside of South America. 

 Its discovery in so ancient a formation in 

 this country raises some interesting problems 

 in ancient geography, for South America is 

 supposed to have been an island continent 



