Third Asiatic Expedition 27 



Progress toward exhibition in the Mexican Hall has been 

 made through the preparation of two serpent columns, parts of 

 the great temple fagade of Chichen Itza, originally 

 The secured for the Museum through the efforts of 



Mexican Colonel Edward H. Thompson in 1912, with the 

 idea that the Aztec Mexican Hall which would con- 

 tain them would soon be under process of construction. 

 The present Mexican collection has been enriched by the 

 addition of several of the original stone monuments secured 

 by Mr. John L. Stevens, who visited Yucatan in 1839- 1840, on 

 a special mission for the United States Government. These 

 were presented to the Museum through the Jesup Fund. 



The human history purposes of the Third Asiatic Expedi- 

 tion, under Associate Curator Roy Chapman Andrews, have 



aroused a wider public interest than any other un- 

 The Third dertaking of the Museum in recent years. Mr. 

 Expedition Andrews himself presented the subject with great 



ability throughout the country. The possibility of 

 discovering some link or links in the Asiatic ancestry of man, 

 or at least of adding to the history of man in Asia, has stimu- 

 lated nation-wide interest in this subject and has led to the 

 contribution of nearly two hundred thousand dollars to the 

 Third Asiatic Expedition Fund, the research to be extended 

 over a period of five years and to be published in the Asiatic 

 Researches of the American Museum. The American Asiatic 

 Association and the magazine Asia have cooperated generously 

 in this work, and through the columns of Asia and in the pages 

 of Natural History it is planned to make the results of the 

 Expedition very widely known. The splendid zoological col- 

 lections of the First and Second Asiatic Expeditions will be 

 supplemented by collections from several hitherto unexplored 

 regions on the borders of Mongolia and Tibet, as well as by 

 a trip into the Gobi Desert which is planned through the co- 

 operation of the Geological Survey of China to advance our 

 knowledge of the distribution and succession of the Tertiary 

 beds, and of the Quaternary in which we may expect to find 

 some traces of the prehistory of man. The continued cooper- 



