22 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION. 1937 



with the types of West Indian and tropical American Staphylinidae 

 in the collections of the British Museum and Dr. Malcolm Cameron. 

 The extension of the award for a third year made possible the 

 additional 9 months of field work in 1936. Dr. Blackwelder plans 

 to visit Cuba for a week in the fall of 1937 to study the collection 

 of Staphylinidae of Alexander Bierig. The remainder of the year 

 will be occupied with the preparation of a revision of the 500 to 600 

 species collected or known from the islands. 



SIXTH ARTHUR I^CTURE 



The sixth Arthur lecture, Discoveries from Solar Eclipse Expedi- 

 tions, by Samuel Alfred Mitchell, director of the Leander McCormick 

 Observatory, Univei*sity of Virginia, was given in the auditorium of 

 the National Museum on the evening of February 9, 1937. Dr. 

 Mitchell, a loading authority on eclipses, has personally observed 

 nearly all the total solar eclipses of the present century. In his lec- 

 ture he touched upon the frequency of eclipses and their prediction, 

 facts learned from a study of the gorgeous corona which accompanies 

 a total eclipse, the use of eclipses in the verification of the relativity 

 theory, and many other interesting aspects of this grandest of natural 

 phenomena — an eclipse of the sun. The lecture will be published in 

 full with illustrations in the 1937 Smithsonian Report. 



EXPLORATIONS AND FIELD WORK 



Field expeditions play an important part in many of the Institu- 

 tion's researches in biology, geology, anthropology, and astrophysics. 

 During the last calendar year 19 expeditions were in the field; the 

 regions visited included, besides 18 States in the United States, Green- 

 land, Alaska, Canada, the Bahamas, Honduras, Guatemala, England, 

 Germany, Holland, and Siam. 



Secretary C. G. Abbot continued at Washington his work on per- 

 fecting an engine to convert the sun's rays into power. Dr. R. S. 

 Bassler studied the geology of several classic European areas and 

 conducted researches on fossil echinodenns and corals in European 

 museums. E. P. Henderson collected epidote and other minerals in 

 southeastern Alaska. Dr. (j. Arthur Cooper studied and collected 

 fossils from the Devonian beds of the midwestern United States. 

 Dr. C. Lewis Gazin conducted a successful search for fossil mammals 

 in Mew Mexico and Arizona. Dr. Alexander Wetmore studied and 

 collected the birds of the Guatemalan highlands. Watson M. Perrygo 

 and Carleton Dingebach collected birds and mammals in an area in 

 West Virginia hitherto unrepresented in the National Museum's 

 collections. H. G. Deignan made a zoological survey of the little- 



