344 The Smithsonian Institution 



Pacific and the British Islands. In the total number of spe- 

 cimens, the collection is the largest in the world, including 

 over six hundred thousand specimens of dry shells and five 

 thousand jars of alcoholic molluscan material. The collection 

 of Cenozoic fossil shells comprises the largest existing series 

 of the tertiary fauna of the United States ; and probably the 

 largest series of Antillean tertiary shells in any museum, though 

 much remains to be done in naming and classifying the fossil 

 material. 



" It may be said without fear of contradiction, that for the 

 regions mentioned, the Department of Mollusks is unrivaled, 

 not only in the amount and variety of material it contains, 

 but especially in the full and correct data recorded in respect 

 to the specimens, and which gives to them a really scientific 

 value, which is wanting in most of the great collections of the 

 world, which were mostly made at a period when the impor- 

 tance of such data was not fully recognized. No other col- 

 lection contains nearly as many American and British type 

 specimens ; and only the British Museum rivals ours in the 

 number of species represented from the whole world. No 

 other collection has so large a representation of deep-sea 

 mollusks and brachiopods, for the study of which the National 

 collection is indispensable." 



Of the Department of Insects, Doctor L. O. Howard, the 

 Honorary Curator, writes : 



"Taking the collection as a whole, and aside from the con- 

 sideration of the individual collections of which it is composed, 

 I should say that its most important features are, first, the 

 rapidly accumulating number of types in all orders, amounting 

 already to more than thirty-five hundred species; and second, 

 the biologic features of the collection, due largely to the fact 

 that the original deposit by Doctor Riley was mainly biologic in 

 its character, and to the further fact that the biologic accumu- 

 lations of the United States Department of Agriculture for 

 seventeen years, which have been very great, are now in the 

 possession of the Museum. 



