96 THE AMERICAN MUSEUM JOURNAL 



Dr. R. M. Anderson was appointed assistant in the department of mammalogy 

 at the February meeting of the board of trustees. Dr. Anderson will accom- 

 pany the Stefansson expedition to the Arctic as zoologist and second in command. 



Mr. J. H. O'Neil, assistant in the department of public health, has resigned to 

 accept an appointment as sanitary engineer of the State Board of Health of Louisi- 

 ana. His place is taken by Mr. D. Greenberg, a graduate of the College of the City 

 of New York. 



Dr. W. D. Matthew of the department of vertebrate palaeontology left on Feb- 

 ruary 3 for a month's trip to Los Angeles, California, where he is to study the famous 

 asphaltum pools of Rancho La Brea in connection with a group now under prepara- • 

 tion in the department. He hopes also to effect exchanges with California institu- 

 tions which have done excavating at La Brea ranch, whereby the Museum may ac- 

 quire additional specimens of the wonderfully preserved Pleistocene fossils which 

 these asphaltum pools contain. The Museum's present collection from these de- 

 posits, obtained through exchange, includes skeletons of the saber-toothed tiger 

 and an extinct species of wolf and a skull of the ground sloth. Dr. Matthew is taking 

 advantage of the opportunity to visit en route the museums of Pittsburgh, Chicago, 

 Lincoln, Laramie and San Francisco. 



Dr. C-E. A. Winslow has recently been elected president of the Society of 

 American Bacteriologists. 



Dr. R. W. Shufeldt of Washington, who is well known as one of the few authori- 

 ties upon fossil birds in this country, has completed a revision of the Pleistocene 

 fossil birds in the American Museum collections and is now engaged upon a study 

 of the Tertiary bird specimens. Fossil birds are extremely rare and Dr. Shufeldt's 

 contributions will add materially to one of the least known chapters of the history of 

 life. Among the specimens in his hands for study are a few fragments of a gigantic 

 bird from the Lower Eocene equalling in size the extinct moa of New Zealand. This 

 specimen v/as found by the Museum expedition in Wyoming last summer, and some 

 more or less imaginative notices of it have appeared in the daily papers. The full 

 results of Dr. Shufeldt's studies will appear in the American Museum Bulletin. 



During the past month there have been a number of additions to the collections 

 of the department of mammalogy. Thirty-five of the great fruit bats from the 

 Philippine Islands with complete accessory material for a group have been received. 

 These bats are found in rookeries consisting at times of as many as fifteen or twenty 

 thousand individuals. The collections made by Dr. Rudolph M. Anderson in the 

 Arctic have arrived at the Museum. Among them is the magnificent series of barren 

 ground bear which has already been noted in the Journal. Also the northern Korea 

 collections of mammals made by Mr. Roy C. Andrews, have arrived in New York 

 safely after what proved to be an adventurous voyage from the Orient. 



Mr. Clyde G. Fisher of Johns Hopkins University, has been appointed assistant 

 curator in the department of public education, the appointment to take effect on 

 May 1, 1913. 



On Saturday afternoon, March 8, the Museum will tender a reception to the 

 public school teachers who give their services for the after-school athletics of the 

 girls' branches of the Public Schools Athletic League. 



