46 REPORT OF NATIONAL MUSEUM, 1910. 
other cases the material was requested as loans to aid in researches 
which had been started elsewhere. In essentially all cases the work 
is carried on gratuitously, the compensation, if any, consisting in the 
gift of a set of duplicate specimens. When the investigations are 
being conducted directly for publication by the Museum, the cost of 
illustrations may be allowed. 
DEPARTMENT OF GEOLOGY. 
Accessions.—This department received about 18,000 specimens, the 
accessions being distributed among the several divisions as follows: 
Systematic and applied geology, 63; mineralogy, 26; invertebrate 
paleontology, 33; vertebrate paleontology, 26; paleobotany, 9. 
Among the additions in systematic and applied geology may first be 
mentioned a series of volcanic glasses from the island of Billiton and 
from Australia, included under the names of billitonite, obsidianite, 
and obsidian bombs, which are at present exciting considerable 
interest on account of their supposed though unproven meteoric 
nature. A small complete meteorite from McDuffie County, Georgia, 
and fragmental portions of others from Hvittis, Finland; Lampa, 
Chile, and Shrewsbury, Pennsylvania, were purchased. Sixty-one 
rock specimens were obtained in exchange from the museum at 
Colombo, Ceylon. The following were presented: Two large speci- 
mens of magnesite from Porterville, California, by the Tulare Mining 
Company; 62 specimens of rocks and ores from the mines at Mount 
Lyell, Tasmania, by the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company; 
a small series of drift rocks from the antarctic region, by Sir Ernest 
Henry Shackleton; and a small but very interesting series of obsidians 
from Iceland, by Dr. F. E. Wright. 
The most noteworthy acquisition by the division of mineralogy was 
a large series of type specimens of mercury minerals from Terlingua, 
Texas, which had formed the basis of important chemical and crystal- 
lographic investigations by Messrs. Hillebrand and Schaller, depos- 
ited by the United States Geological Survey. Among specimens pur- 
chased were fine examples of calamine, mimetite, calcite, niccolite, 
sphalerite, crystallized carnotite, bloomstrandite, and alamosite. 
The Dallas Mining Company, of Coalinga, California, donated a fine 
showy specimen of the new gem stone, benitoite, associated with 
neptunite; and the Rhodesia Museum, Bulawayo, South Africa, sent 
in exchange two specimens of the rare minerals tarbuttite and hopeite 
from the Broken Hill mines. Mr. F. P. Graves, of Doe Run, Missouri, 
presented some fine amethystine calcite twins from that locality, and 
Dr. AleS Hrdlitka, of the Museum staff, secured an interesting series 
of sand barite crystals at Kharga, Egypt, during an anthropological 
trip to the Lybian Desert in 1909. 
