Records of Meetings 163 



Meetings of the Sections 

 section of natural science 



The section held one meeting, the annual meeting, on Saturday evening 

 April 8, 1916. 



The meeting was called to order by the chairman, Mr. Charles W. Leng. 



Present: William T. Davis, Arthur Hollick, Howard H. Cleaves, and 

 Harold K. Decker. 



The minutes of the meeting of May 20, 191 5, were read and approved as 

 corrected. 



The election of officers for the ensuing year resulted in the reelection of 

 Charles W. Leng as chairman and Howard H. Cleaves as recorder. 



Dr. Arthur Hollick read a biographical sketch of the late Sanderson Smith 

 (see this issue, p. 141), and also presented the following items as character- 

 istic examples of the manner in which specimens reach the museum and of 

 the varied requests for information which the members of the museum staff are 

 called upon to supply: 



1. In the early part of last summer (1915) Mr. John Hall, a soldier sta- 

 tioned at Fort Wadsworth, came to the museum with some Indian relics 

 (arrow points, fragments of pottery, etc.) which he had picked up in the 

 military reservation. I communicated with the fort commander, Lt. Colonel 

 T. S. Lamoreux, and received a pass to enter on and make investigations within 

 the reservation. On June 28 I met Mr. Hall there by appointment and he 

 guided me to the places where relics had been found. We picked up several 

 that day and Mr. Hall has since brought in many more. (A tray containing 

 arrow points, drills, rejects, British and American military buttons, bullets, 

 etc., were exhibited in connection with the above note.) 



2. Clippings from the New York World and New York Evening Journal of 

 March 5, 1915, and the Staten Islander of March 6 and 10 were read, de- 

 scribing the discovery of the bones of a supposed "dinotherium," which were 

 dug up a few days previously during the progress of excavating for the 

 foundation of the new courthouse at Saint George. What was described in the 

 newspapers as the skull proved on examination to be the pelvic bone of a cow. 

 This bone, and others from the excavation, were turned in to the museum. 

 (The pelvic bone mentioned was exhibited.) 



3. The acting president of the borough, Mr. Lewis Nixon, recently trans- 

 mitted to me a letter received from the Bureau of American Ethnology of the 

 Smithsonian Institution, dated February 16, 1915, containing the statement 

 that the Bureau is engaged in the preparation of a work to be known as the 

 Handbook of Aboriginal Remains East of the Mississippi, to contain references 

 to and descriptions of Indian mounds, burial places, village sites, etc., and 

 stating that "as yet we have been unable to secure the desired information 

 from your county. If you can supply such information the courtesy will be 

 appreciated. ..." I wrote, giving a list of references to articles in our 

 Proceedings and in the publications of the American Museum of Natural 

 History, and under date of March 2 an appreciative acknowledgment was 



