2 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 19 3 8 



tinued in favor with a very large listening audience as witnessed by 

 the nearly quarter of a million letters received as the result of the 

 program. 



Among the large amount of material received by the National 

 Museum, an outstanding accession is a collection of mollusks obtained 

 through the Frances Lea Chamberlain fund which numbered well 

 over a million specimens. The Bureau of American Ethnology dis- 

 patched an expedition to South America to make extensive studies of 

 the Indian tribes of the western part of that continent. New ap- 

 paratus and new methods have been developed in the Division of 

 Radiation and Organisms, and investigations have yielded important 

 results particularly in the field of photosynthesis. 



The Board of Regents lost three of its members by death, Senator 

 Joseph T. Robinson, Ambassador Robert W. Bingham, and Augustus 

 P. Loring. To fill the vacancies thus created, three new members were 

 appointed, namely, Senator Alben W. Barkley, of Kentucky; Dr. 

 Harvey N. Davis, of New Jersey; and Dr. Arthur H. Compto'n, of 

 Illinois. 



SUMMARY OF THE YEAR'S ACTIVITIES OF THE BRANCHES OF THE 



INSTITUTION 



National Museum.— The total appropriation for the maintenance 

 of the Museum was $775,720, an actual increase of $11,750 over the 

 previous year. Specimens added to the collections, mainly as gifts 

 or through Smithsonian expeditions, numbered 312,729. In this 

 large amount of new material some of the more important accessions 

 were as follows: In anthropology, nearly a hundred vessels and frag- 

 ments from Honduras, obtained by the joint expedition with the 

 Peabody Museum of Harvard University, and other archeological 

 collections from Denmark, South Africa, and the Temple Mound in 

 Le Flore County, Okla.; in biology, large additions to the collec- 

 tions of mammals, birds, reptiles, fishes, marine invertebrates, and 

 insects, the latter including 54,000 insects transferred from the United 

 States Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine; in geology, 

 specimens representing 62 distinct meteoric falls, largely purchased 

 by the Roebling Fund, 790 specimens pertaining to mineralooy and 

 petrology obtained through the Chamberlain Fund and the Canfield 

 Fund, and an unparalleled collection of Devonian invertebrates made 

 by Dr. G. Arthur Cooper and Preston Cloud in the Lower Peninsula 

 of Michigan; in arts and industries, the first cable car to operate in 

 Seattle, Wash. (1889), presented by the city of Seattle, 1,500 speci- 

 mens pertaining to textiles, and a number of models of famous air- 

 planes added to the aeronautical collection; and in history, more 

 than 2,500 objects of historic and antiquarian value, including a num- 



