468 The Smithsonian Institution 



many of the earlier surveys, the government supplied suffi- 

 cient means both for equipment and for publication, and the 

 Institution was seldom appealed to for aid. Its connection 

 with these government organizations was therefore, on the 

 whole, a more indirect one than in the case of the earlier 

 surveys. 



It became the custodian, however, of large collections, 

 chiefly zoological, made by naturalists and surgeons con- 

 nected with the field parties. To these same naturalists, 

 when they returned from the field, the Institution opened its 

 great stores of natural history material, and supplied work- 

 rooms ; and in many of the zoological treatises published by 

 the geological and geographical surveys, by way of illustra- 

 tion, we find acknowledgment of the^ assistance rendered. 



Thus, Doctor J. A. Allen, in his monographs of the North 

 American hares published in the eleventh volume of the 

 quarto reports of the United States Geological Survey of 

 the Territories, under the direction of Doctor F. V. Hayden, 

 remarks : 



" The author has thus had access not only to the types of 

 the species described by Professor S. F. Baird in his great 

 work on the ' Mammals of North America,' published in 1857, 

 but also to nearly all the material used by him in his excel- 

 lent elaboration of this family in the above-named work, 

 together with the vast amount of material that has since ac- 

 cumulated at the Smithsonian Institution. This includes not 

 only the collections made by the different government expe- 

 ditions since 1857, but also the large collections made since 

 that date, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, 

 in Alaska, the British Possessions, Mexico, and Central 

 America. By far the larger portion of the specimens ex- 

 amined from localities within the United States received from 

 any one source have been the collections made either by 

 Doctor F. V. Hayden personally or under his immediate 



