REPORT ON MUSEUM WORK 285 



CURATOR'S REPORT ON MUSEUM WORK 



1912-1913. 



The past year has produced no such exciting or strenuous 

 incidents as were provided the year before by the whale whose 

 skeleton we cut out on the coast near Amble. A considerable 

 amount of solid work has been accomplished, however, in 

 addition to the incidental duties which necessarily take up a 

 great deal of our time. In the main our work has followed 

 the lines of the preceding year or two. The chief deviation, 

 in fact, has been the preparation of the whale's bones. 

 Nearly all of them we had buried in a sand pit made for the 

 purpose in the museum grounds, and on opening it early this 

 summer we were pleased to find that many of the bones were 

 ready for the final cleaning and preparation for mounting. 

 This we accordingly took in hand, and we now have the ribs, 

 shoulder blades, various smaller bones and most of the 

 vertebrae finished and brought indoors. The cervical verte- 

 brae and the smaller caudals we had put to macerate in the 

 usual way in water, and we were surprised at the little 

 progress they had made compared with the bones in the sand. 

 We have transferred them all to sand to finish the process. 

 The skull and jaws have also had to be put back in sand for 

 a few months longer, though all but small portions of them 

 are finished. 



We have taken casts of a certain number of fishes during 

 the year. The most important are a set which nearly com- 

 plete our representation of the life history of the salmon ; we 

 now have the stages known as parr, smolt, grilse, fresh-run 

 salmon, and kelt. We have also made casts of a few things 

 other than fishes, the largest being a full-grown porpoise. A 

 particularly elaborate and difficult cast was that of a squid : 

 the animal was too large to mount in any but a very expensive 

 jar, and we obtained a perfect cast of it by means of a waste- 

 mould in wax. 



