REPORT OF THE SECRETARY 3 
and war agencies on the one hand, and the scientific and educational 
institutions of the Nation on the other. Many urgent reports and 
items of strategic information have been furnished by the Board prin- 
cipally on the peoples, geography, and related features of war areas. 
The offices of the Board are in the Smithsonian building, and three 
members of the Institution’s staff were assigned to assist the Director, 
Dr. William Duncan Strong. The Army and Navy found the ser- 
vices of the Board so useful that each appointed liaison officers to 
facilitate contact. ‘The Board plans to continue in operation as long 
as needed during the coming fiscal year. 
Inter-American Cooperation—Through invitation by other agen- 
cies and through its own initiative, the Institution engaged in a 
number of activities designed to promote better cultural relations with 
the other American republics. Work on the monumental Handbook 
of South American Indians, under the editorship of Dr. Julian H. 
Steward, was advanced materially. Volume 1, “The Marginal 
Tribes,” and volume 2, “The Andean Civilizations,” went to the 
printer toward the close of the fiscal year, and the manuscripts of 
volumes 3 and 4 were well on toward completion. The editorial work 
on this project is financed by the State Department, and the printing 
costs will be borne by the Bureau of American Ethnology, Smithsonian 
Institution, as the Handbook will appear in the Bureau’s Bulletin 
series. 
In September 1943 Dr. Steward was appointed Director of the 
Institute of Social Anthropology, an autonomous unit of the Bureau 
of American Ethnology reporting to the Secretary, created to carry 
out cooperative training in anthropological teaching and research 
with the other American republics as part of the program of the 
Interdepartmental Committee for Cooperation with the American 
Republics. The work of the Institute in Mexico was begun in co- 
operation with the Escuela Nacional de Antropologia of the Instituto 
Nacional de Antropologia e Historia, and plans were pending for 
work in several other American republics. Dr. Steward also served 
on the Temporary Organizing Committee of the Inter-American 
Society of Anthropology and Geography, which had been started on 
his initiative during the previous year. Dr. Ralph L. Beals served 
as secretary of the committee and editor of the quarterly journal of 
the Society, Acta Americana. Paid membership in the Society from 
all parts of the Americas reached a total of 800. 
A valuable biological project is the publication by the Institution 
of a “Checklist of the Coleopterous Insects of Mexico, Central America, 
the West Indies, and South America,” by Dr. R. E. Blackwelder. 
No list of this important insect group now exists, and entomologists of 
all the Americas will find it indispensable in future researches. The 
