14 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1909. 



The present lease of the table expires December 31, 1909, but its 

 renewal for another term of three years has been decided on, so that 

 applications for the seat may now be submitted at any time. 



As in former years, the cooperation of the members of the advisory 

 committee has been of great value in the examination of applications 

 for the seat, and is always thoroughly appreciated. 



PUBLICATIONS. 



The publication work of the Smithsonian Institution has from its 

 beginning been one of its most important functions. It has been 

 the principal medium for the " diffusion of knowledge " throughout 

 the world. The Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge, the 

 Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, and the Smithsonian Annual 

 Reports are publications widely known, and the demand for copies 

 of these works has constantly been much in excess of the possible 

 supply. The editions of the " Contributions " and the " Collections " 

 are necessarily restricted by the limited income of the Institution, 

 and their distribution is almost entirely to public institutions rather 

 than to individuals. The Annual Reports, however, are public docu- 

 ments, issued at the expense of a congressional appropriation. 

 Although this permits of editions of several thousand copies, yet the 

 entire number is each year exhausted soon after the date of 

 publication. 



Besides the publications of the Institution proper there are issued 

 under its direction the Bulletins and Annual Reports of the United 

 States National Museum and of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 

 and the Annals of the Astrophysical Observatory. The details 

 relating to these various series during the year will be found in the 

 appendix to this report. 



In the series of " Contributions " no new volume was published, 

 although there was issued a new edition of Professor Langley's 

 memoir on " The internal work of the wind," originally printed in 

 1893. To this new edition was added, as an appendix, a translation 

 of the " Solution of a special case of the general problem," by Rene 

 de Saussure, which appeared in 1893 in Revue de l'Aeronautique 

 Theorique et Applique, Paris, in connection with a French reproduc- 

 tion of the above memoir by Professor Langley. 



The quarterly issue of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 

 has now reached its fifth volume. Twenty papers were published in 

 this series during the year. One of these papers. " Some recent con- 

 tributions to our knowledge of the sun," was a lecture delivered at 

 Washington April 22, 1908, under the auspices of the Hamilton fund 

 of the Smithsonian Institution. Another paper, by Dr. Cyrus Adler, 

 tells of the relation of Richard Rush to the Smithsonian Institution. 

 Mr. Rush was agent of the United States to secure the bequest of 



