1870.] 



SENATE— No. 170. 



9 



for exchange have been prepared. Beside his unremitting and 

 most efficient work, in his own department, Mr. Perry has given 

 two courses of lectures, during the academic year. He has 

 presented to the Museum a valuable collection of fossils, the 

 result of fifteen years' work among the rocks of New England. 

 Our fossil collections have also been enriched by a large collec- 

 tion of fossil Echinoderms from M. Cotteau, the more valuable 

 for being labelled by that distinguished palasontologist. 



The report of Dr. Maack on fossil Vertebrates, simple and 

 short as it is, speaks for itself. It will be seen how efficient 

 and able an assistant we have secured in him, and how greatly 

 such aid was needed in the Museum. 



Dr. Stahli has been engaged in arranging and cataloguing 

 the library, which is becoming, chiefly by exchange, every year 

 more valuable. As this Report goes to press I have received 

 an invoice announcing five series of costly German scientific 

 periodicals, presented by Prof. P. Merian, in behalf of the 

 University of Basle. 



The class of Reptiles is the only one which has received little 

 attention during the past year. For the class of Fishes a great 

 deal has been done in the way of sorting and arranging speci- 

 mens according either to their systematic or their faunal rela- 

 tions. In this work I have been chiefly aided by Messrs. Bliss 

 and Lockwood, students in the Scientific School, and for a time 

 also by Mr. Martin and Dr. Stahli. But the amount of 

 materials on hand is so large that the progress appears slow. 

 In the arrangement of the Mollusks preserved in alcohol, I 

 have received much aid from Mr. Blake, also a student in the 

 Museum. 



Mr. Paul Roetter, now permanently attached to the Museum 

 as artist, has been most industrious in drawing illustrations of 

 various kinds, but chiefly of fishes and Crustacea for the forth- 

 coming publications of the Museum. Among these a monograph 

 of the North American Astacidae, by Dr. Hagen, will soon be 

 ready for distribution. 



One of the most valuable accessions ever received at the 

 Museum consists of collections brought up from deep-sea 

 soundings, made by a party of the Coast Survey, according to the 

 directions of the Superintendent, Professor Peirce. These 

 large collections contain the various kinds of marine animals, 

 2 



