185 



OFFICE AND LABORATORY ORGANIZATION.* 



By S. A. Forbes, Champaign, III. 



With the sudden establishment of a large number of new offices and 

 laboratories of investigation in a field hitherto very slightly occupied, 

 the subject of special office organization and equipment becomes highly 

 important and interesting, and will become more so as the work of each 

 station increases in scope, difficulty, and complexity. Although I have 

 never been a station worker, in an experience of fifteen years in the 

 gradual development of a natural history institution, in which I began 

 ignorant and alone and which now commonly employs six to eight 

 assistants, I have learned, among other things, the very great impor- 

 tance of having from the first a well-considered and elastic scheme of 

 organization, under which the work may grow freely from year to year 

 without outgrowing any of the more or less costly equipment of its earlier 

 periods. While an investigator works alone, or with mechanical aids at 

 most, he needs little else, perhaps, but helps to memory; but as soon as 

 he finds himself able and obliged to call in the aid of more or less skilled 

 assistants, the results of whose labors he must be able to command and 

 collate rapidly at will, he finds an elaborate system indispensable. A 

 future of this description I hope we may all at least look forward to; 

 and it is on this ground that I have thought it profitable to describe my 

 own system — tested now by several years' use in a field somewhat more 

 trying, probably, than the average station worker will need to occupy. 



The institution to which I refer combines under one management a 

 natural-history survey of Illinois, the work of the official entomologist 

 of that State, and the instruction work of the department of zoology 

 aud entomology in the State University; and the object of its organiza- 

 tion is such a co-ordination of the collections (both determined and un- 

 determined, technical and economic), the collection records, the notes 

 of observations and experiments (whether my own or those of my assist- 

 ants), the correspondence of the office, and the literature accessible to 

 us, that each and all of these may be readily drawn upon and made 

 completely available for the treatment of any subject whatever which 

 comes within our field. 



The essentials are the collections (classified and unclassified), the 

 records, the notes and correspondence, and the library; and the organ- 

 ization consists in an arrangement and orderly analysis of each of these, 

 with a complete system of cross-references from one to another. The 

 collections are, as usual, the reference collections (determined, labeled, 

 and precisely arranged in the zoological order) and the miscellaneous, 

 duplicate, and undetermined material, including the economic series ; 

 the records are the accessions catalogue aud the species catalogue, 

 with card index to each ; the notes are on slips, in labeled boxes, classi- 



* Read before the second meeting of the Association of Economic Entomologists, 

 November 13, 1889. 



