8 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1908. 



feet of strata were carefully examined and measured, and collections 

 of fossils and rocks made from many localities. It was found that 

 the Cambrian section included over 12,000 feet of sandstones, shales, 

 and limestones, and that the three great divisions of the Cambrian— 

 the Lower, Middle, and Upper— were represented in the Bow -River 

 series and the Castle Mountain group. Characteristic fossils were 

 found in each division. At the close of the fiscal year papers were 

 in type" describing the sections measured and giving lists of the 

 faunas obtained at the various horizons. The field season of 1908 

 will be spent in Montana, British Columbia, and Alberta in an at- 

 tempt to correlate the pre-Cambrian formations of Montana studied 

 in 1905,^ with those described by Willis and Daly in the vicinity of 

 the Forty-ninth i3arallel. 



AERIAL NAVIGATION. 



Within the past year there has been a renewed interest in experi- 

 ments in aerial navigation, to which this Institution, through my pred- 

 ecessor, Mr. Langley, made notable contributions. Toward the end 

 of the year the demand for literature on the subject so entirely 

 exhausted the supply of papers on hand, that a special edition of some 

 of Mr. Langley's more popular memoirs was issued. It is gratifying 

 to me to be able to say that his pioneer work in heavier-than-air 

 machines, resulting as it did in the actual demonstration of the possi- 

 bility of mechanical flight, has now received universal recognition. 



Besides numerous popular papers, Mr. Langley wrote two technical 

 works relating to the general subject of aerodromics, which form 

 parts of an incomplete volume of the Smithsonian Contributions to 

 Knowledge. The record of his experiments from 1893 to 1905 was 

 kept by him partly in manuscript form and largely in the shape of 

 voluminous notes and wastebooks. These have been turned over to 

 his principal assistant in this work, Mr. Charles M. Manly, who has 

 been for some time engaged in preparing them for publication and 

 adding such necessary information, especially on the engineering 

 side, as comes within the immediate purview of Mr. Manly's work. 

 It is a source of regret that the memoir has not yet been completed 

 for publication, but I hope that during this year it will be possible 

 for the Institution to issue the volume, thus bringing to a conclusion 

 a record of Mr. Langley's original and epoch-making contributions 



"Canadian Alpine Journal, Vol. I, No. 2, 1908, pp. 232-248: Mount Stephen 

 rocks and fossils, 



Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. LIII, Cambrian Geology and 

 Paleontology, No. 5, 1908, pp. 167-230: Cambrian sections of the Cordilleran 



area. 



*Bull. Geol. Soc. America, vol. 17, 1906, pp. 1-28: Algonkian formations of 

 northwestern Montana. 



