MUSEUM NOTES 
at the Yale Medical School, New Haven, but 
in his capacity as curator of public health at 
the American Museum he will be in New York 
regularly on Tuesdays. 
Dr. GeorcE F. Kunz, honorary curator of 
gems in the American Museum, has been 
awarded a gold medal at the Panama Pacific 
Exposition for his collection of publications 
on gems. Tiffany and Company, with whose 
firm Dr. Kunz has long been identified as gem 
expert, have been awarded the grand prize 
for their collection illustrating the formation 
of gems under changing mineralogical and 
geological conditions. The books and mono- 
graphs by Dr. Kunz occupy one case of the 
Tiffany exhibit. 
Mrs. ADRIAN HoFrrmMaNn JOLINE has re- 
cently been elected a life member of the 
Museum in acknowledgment of her generous 
contributions to the funds of the Asiatic 
expedition for the collection of mammals. 
Major John V. Lauderdale, Surgeon United 
States Army has also been made a life 
member in appreciation of his gift to the 
Museum of a collection of ethnological speci- 
mens. 
Messrs. FRANK E. Lutz and A. J. Mutcu- 
LER spent six weeks of the past summer 
studying and collecting insects and spiders 
in Porto Rico. The work was a part of the 
insular survey being made under the auspices 
of the New York Academy of Sciences. 
Considerable territory was covered, especially 
in the western portion of the island. More 
than fifteen thousand specimens were ob- 
tained. 
On Friday evening, November 19, Dr. G. 
Clyde Fisher, assistant curator of public 
education at the American Museum, will 
lecture to the adult blind of New York City 
and Brooklyn on ‘Bird Neighbors and their 
Homes.” The procedure at this and subse- 
quent lectures will differ from that at previous 
lectures, in that small habitat groups of the 
birds and their nests will be placed in the 
entrance hall that the blind may handle them 
and thus have a definite idea of the birds as 
they are mentioned in the lecture. The 
doors will be open for the inspection of birds 
and their nests at 7.45, the lecture following 
at 8.15. On December 17, Mr. Ernest Harold 
Baynes will lecture to the blind on animal life. 
375 
Tue twentieth free exhibition in the art 
gallery of the Washington Irving high school, 
Irving Place, New York, consisted of primi- 
tive American textiles loaned by the Ameri- 
can Museum of Natural History. Peruvian 
cloth and weaving implements, and Navajo, 
Chilkat, Saltillo and Chimayo blankets com- 
prised the exhibit. 
A coursE of lectures open to school chil- 
dren will be given at the American Museum 
on Monday afternoons at four o’clock, begin- 
ning November 1 and lasting through Decem- 
ber 6; Wednesday afternoons, beginning 
November 3 and lasting through December 8; 
and Friday afternoons beginning October 2 
up to and including December 10. A people’s 
course will be given on Tuesday and Saturday 
evenings in conjunction with the department 
of education at 8.15 and will continue through 
December 21. 
Dr. L. P. Graracap, curator of mineralogy 
at the American Museum, has just returned 
from a recreative trip of two months over 
Canada. ‘Traveling from east to west, he en- 
joyed a rapid survey of the plains of Manitoba, 
Saskatchewan and Alberta, with some exami- 
nation of the commercial and economic features 
of Winnipeg, Medicine-Hat, Calgary and Sud- 
bury, also impressions of the geological devel- 
opments of the Rockies and the Selkirks. 
Durine the past year Mr. Roy C. Andrews 
has been preparing a monograph on the sei 
whale (Balenoptera borealis Lesson), a fine 
skeleton of which he secured in Japan dur- 
ing the summer of 1910. Although the sei 
whale has formed the basis of the summer 
fishery of the Japanese for some fifteen 
years, it had never reached the attention of 
a scientific observer and was supposed not 
to occur in the Pacific. The forthcoming 
monograph is the result of collaboration 
with Professor Hermon von W. Schulte of 
the department of comparative anatomy of 
the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New 
York City, who has made an elaborate study 
of the soft anatomy of a sei whale foetus 
which Mr. Andrews brought from Japan in 
1910. Thisis the first time that the anatomy 
of any species of large whale has been treated 
in a monographic form. * 
Tue Garner African Film Company has 
recently been organized for the purpose of 
