68 Report of the President 



tor in the department, an early volunteer with rank as captain, 

 spent a few months in an American camp, then went to France 



as an officer in the United States Forestry Regiment. 



With headquarters in Paris, a member of the Comite 

 Inter allie des Bois de Guerre, he has charge of the selection 

 and acquisition of standing timber to be cut for war purposes. 

 He has six hundred men under him to do the work in logging 

 and deliver the timber to the Expeditionary Force, and his 

 problem is to take out of a given forest as large a yield as pos- 

 sible and leave the forest silviculturally intact. 



EXISTING INVERTEBRATES* 

 Henry Edward Crampton, Curator 



In the last month of the year, the Department and the Mu- 

 seum suffered an irreparable loss through the death of Mr. 

 Louis P. Gratacap, Curator of Conchology. Mr. Grata- 

 cap's devoted service of more than two score years and 

 his patient and time-consuming labor for the development of 

 the shell collections of the Museum call for the fullest and sin- 

 cerest tribute. 



At the beginning of the year Mr. Roy W. Miner and Dr. 

 Frank E. Lutz were made Associate Curators. Mr. J. F. Con- 

 nolly, a laboratory assistant, has entered the National Army. 



On account of the disturbed conditions throughout America 

 and the world, field work in invertebrate zoology has been con- 

 fined to near-by areas, or has been carried on 

 Research and w [\h direct reference to exhibition purposes, 



Publication . , \ 



while special efforts have been directed toward 

 research and publication. The Curator's volume on the Par- 

 tulse of Tahiti, published by the Carnegie Institution of Wash- 

 ington, appeared in January, as the first in the series on 

 the variation, distribution and evolution of the genus ; consid- 

 erable progress has been made on the second and third volumes. 

 Mr. Miner, ably assisted by several members of the preparation 

 room staff, spent several weeks at the Biological Laboratory at 



Under the Department of Invertebrate Zoology (see also pages 31 and 188). 



