40 MUSEUM OF COMPARATIVE ZOOLOGY. — [Feb. 
they are all preserved, and will be put to good service, either as 
objects on which students may be engaged in learning to note 
likenesses and to discriminate differences, or as material for the 
making of sections illustrative of the interior structure of fossil 
remains. The other portion of this material, steadily increas- 
ing as the Museum collections advance, and in respect to which 
there is no question, is laid aside and will be faithfully reserved 
for purposes of donation and exchange. Although this be a 
subordinate and incidental feature of the work that is going on, 
it is yet one of no small importance as respects the permanent 
usefulness and interest of the institution in advancing the aims 
of science. This surplus material being worked up, in many 
cases with as much thoroughness as that reserved for the use 
of the Museum, is coming to be greatly enhanced in value, as 
well in a pecuniary, as in a scientific point of view; and it is 
believed that, as judiciously employed, it will in the end con- 
tribute not a little to the prosperity, because it is calculated to 
add so much to the usefulness abroad, and to the efficiency at 
home of this cosmopolitan school for the training of naturalists. 
In what has been said, I have had primary and exclusive 
reference to the systematic arrangement of the Tertiary collec- 
tions of the Museum. Substantially, the same remarks might 
be made in regard to the rich assemblages of Mesozoic and 
Palseozoic fossils in the possession of the institution. Indeed, 
essentially the same principles are applicable, and, as I infer, 
are to be carried out in the entire department of Paleontology, 
as well as in the several other departments, of course receiving 
modifications as exigencies may vary, but everywhere pervaded 
by singleness of purpose, and brought to bear in the light of one 
all-controlling idea. It is the aim of the Director to build up a 
Museum, in the proper scientific sense of the term—a Museum 
in which the whole animal kingdom shall be represented, both 
under its existing relations, and as it was in the past, the vast — 
assemblage of specimens being so arranged as to exhibit, in one 
picture, distribution in space as it has appeared from age to 
age; in another, succession in time; and in a third, a system- 
atic view, at once of the affinities and of the diversities of all 
recognized animal forms,—a Museum which shall stand as a 
transcript of the world of animated existence, everywhere reveal- 
ing the thoughts of a Supreme Intelligence, working out under 
