1868.] SENATE— No. 218. 5 



lations, and the equally loud claims of scientific men to share 

 in the advantages which should result from such extensive 

 scientific possessions. Permit me, therefore, to submit to you 

 briefly the present desiderata of the Museum. 



In the first place, to enable me to carry on steadily the work 

 of the internal arrangement of the collections without constant 

 fluctuations and interruptions, the annual income of the 

 Museum, now amounting to about $10,000, should at least be 

 doubled. With our present resources I am frequently obliged 

 to stop operations before they have reached a satisfactory result, 

 and to leave some part of the collections in a complete state of 

 stagnation. The department of Palaeontology, for instance, has 

 not made the slightest advance for the last two years, and hardly 

 anything has been done, thus far, towards improving the condi- 

 tion of the class of Mammalia and Birds ; while the class of 

 Insects has been left for nearly a year without sufficient care. 



In the second place, the necessity, owing to want of room of 

 piling the collections in heaps, instead of laying them out sys- 

 tematically, makes it very laborious to get access to the speci- 

 mens wanted for study. The natural consequence of this is the 

 limited use made of the collections for scientific research, 

 within the Museum itself, and the still greater limitation in 

 affording facilities for study to naturalists not immediately con- 

 nected with the Museum. Whenever investigators of particular 

 branches of Zoology call upon me for information, or for the use 

 of specimens, the present condition of the collections renders it 

 absolutely necessary that I should either personally attend to 

 the search for the specimens wanted, which unavoidably takes 

 me away from more important labors, or allow persons not 

 sufficiently familiar with the general arrangement of the Museum 

 to overhaul our store-rooms, and perhaps bring great confusion 

 among them in their haste to secure what they require. This 

 should not be y and the only way to remedy the evil is to secure 

 competent assistants for each department, so that with a greater 

 division of labor a better system may be introduced throughout 

 the whole, and an easy control maintained over every part of 

 the collection. In this connection I would also allude to 

 the importance of publishing as rapidly as possible the scientific 

 results of the work done in the Museum. It is impossible to 

 arrange such extensive collections as we already possess without 



