E. O. Ulrich, paleontologist 

 of the U.S. Geological Sur- 

 vey, his first office in the 

 Hooe Buildmg, 1901. 



soon as the new National Museum opened, some of the 

 Geological Survey paleontologists moved into it from 

 the brick building and the Hooe Building. To this day, 

 more than a dozen Geological Survey paleontologists 

 remain in the Museum. 



Commission on Fish and Fisheries 



In 1871, eight years before the Geological Survey took 

 shape, the U.S. Gommission on Fish and Fisheries was 

 organized. This was a brainchild of Secretary Baird, 

 who ran it at no extra salary until his death. He settled 

 the commission in the former armory at Seventh and 

 B stieets, SW, and developed additional laboratories in 

 other parts of the country, the most famous of which 

 was at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. The Armory build- 

 ing, which continued to be used for storage of Museum 

 collections for decades, lay in a line with the Army 

 Medical Museum, the original National Museum, and 

 the Castle, so there was plenty of communication be- 

 tween the Smithsonian buildings and the Gommission. 



Shortly after the turn of the century, the Fish Gom- 

 mission became the Bureau of Fisheries under the De- 

 partment of Commerce and Labor. ^ "Technical studies 

 yield valuable data for the fishing industry," a later 

 article explained. "The life habits of fish and the changes 

 in the abundance of various kinds of fish are studied. 

 An efficient fish ladder for the upstream migrations of 

 the salmon and other fish was developed in cooperation 

 with the states and the industry. The Bureau's aid to 

 the pearl button and goldfish industries will long be 

 remembered."^ Smile though one may at the last sen- 

 tence, the scientists of the bureau performed many 

 economically useful investigations. In the course of their 

 activities, the staff of the commission and the bureau 

 collected numerous fishes, most of which were saved 

 for the collections. 



In 1939 the Bureau of Fisheries was transferred to 

 the Interior Department, joining the Biological Survey, 

 transferred to Interior from Agriculture the same year. 

 In 1940 both were absorbed into the Fish and Wildlife 

 Service, which in 1956 became the U.S. Fish and Wild- 

 life Service. The former Fish Commission was parti- 

 tioned into the Bureau of Sports Fisheries and the Bu- 

 reau of Commercial Fisheries, with the latter eventually 

 returning to the jurisdiction of the Department of Com- 

 merce. 



As the events of World War II disrupted Washington, 

 the Old Armory was torn down to make room for tem- 

 porary buildings. (The west end of the National Air 

 and Space Museum now occupies the site.) In 1942 the 

 collections of fish and a few ichthyologists were moved 

 into the north side of the south wing on the ground 

 level of the National Museum. Part of the area was 

 temporarily decked over to make more office space, 

 and one bureau employee was placed in a former la- 

 trine. The fisheries collections were integrated with those 

 of the Division of Fishes — the bureau collections were 

 substantially larger. 



Today the Commerce Department is represented in 

 the Museum building by a few people on the ground 

 floor who do a great deal of scientific work affecting 

 what food we gather from the seas. They enjoy the 

 dubious pleasure of walking on the only original wooden 

 floors remaining in the building. Just to complicate 

 things a little more, or perhaps to show the breadth of 

 the applied-science community, the National System- 

 atics Laboratory of the Department of Commerce used 

 to include a malacologist (a student of the clams and 

 snails), housed on the third floor in the Division of 

 Mollusks. Currently this organization includes, in ad- 

 dition to fish specialists, a "shrimp woman" and a "crab 

 man" with offices in the Division of Crustacea. 



48 



The Structure 



