of steel beams to the walls of the building and no 

 movement of the outer walls has been observed, it 

 is assumed that the walls are successfully resisting 

 the pressure from the piers and that the 

 movement of the latter will probably not continue 

 much farther, if at all. In the meantime an 

 ingenious method of measuring the exact location 

 of the keystones has been devised, and careful 

 observations will be made at intervals of a few 

 months to determine what, if any, further 

 displacement occurs.'* 



Two years later, the report was that "the keystones 

 in the four arches supporting the walls under the dome 

 of the Natural History Building have been subject to 

 periodical inspection, and recent measurements of the 

 east arch indicate a further lessening of the downward 

 movement."" If there was anything serious going on, 

 no one really wanted to face it. In the east range on 

 the first floor, a crack ran the length of the building, 

 but when Edward Henderson suggested that a gauge 

 be put on it to measure the rate of opening, the building 

 superintendent objected that this would interfere with 

 cleaning the floors. 



A few years after he joined the staff, while working 

 in the west attic, Watson Perrygo saw the gap above 

 one of the keystones and later noticed that the gap was 

 getting larger. He and William L. Brown, his supervisor 

 in Taxidermy, wrote a memorandum about the prob- 

 lem, and shortly thereafter a more serious investigation 

 took place. Repairs were undertaken, but the work was 

 far more complex than anyone had anticipated; as a 

 further complication, the original contractor went 

 bankrupt. The Annual Report for 1929 described the 

 process: 



Two great bands of steel were placed around the 

 four huge piers that support the dome, one at the 

 level of the floor of the attic, and one near the 

 tops of the piers in the ceiling above. Between 

 them steel beams were installed extending 

 vertically from band to band behind the piers, with 

 a series of screw jacks between the beams and the 

 bodies of the piers proper. Tension was placed on 

 these jacks in such a way as to bring even strain all 

 around, holding the piers from any possibility of 

 spreading at the top. The delicate operation of 

 adjusting the screw jacks required nearly three 

 weeks for completion and was performed with the 

 cooperation of a corps of engineers from the 

 Bureau of Standards. The work was of a highly 

 specialized nature and attracted considerable 

 attention from engineers. 



A workman who did not know that the topmost part 

 of the inner dome surrounding the central eye of the 

 dome was only plaster started to cross the ceiling of the 

 inner dome and broke through, but was able to hold 

 on by his outstretched arms till other workmen got a 



rope around him. The fall to the rotunda floor 125 

 feet below would have been certain death. 



By July 1929 the work was finished. After a thorough 

 cleaning, the rotunda was reopened to the public on 

 October 23, after being closed for nearly two years. 

 The repair operation apparently was a complete suc- 

 cess. When a similar dome on the main building of the 

 Army War College at Fort McNair in Washington, D.C., 

 developed comparable problems in the 1970s, an ar- 

 chitect spent a few days peering into the Museum dome 

 to see what had been done. A sheet of plastic has been 

 inside the dome, under the skylight, since 1983 to pro- 

 tect the elephant from water leaking through the dome 

 during heavy rains. There is a great deal more to the 

 rotunda than what is on its floor. Because of the ex- 

 tension of the south portico, there are little offices to 

 the east and the west on the south side of the rotunda. 

 On the third floor, these two spots have been used as 

 temporary offices by zoologists and anthropologists. 

 They take some getting used to, since the greatest di- 

 mension in the office is height; the doors are taller than 

 the office is long. 



Adjacent to the elevators are two other rooms, used 

 for dead storage. Within them are the data files on 

 seabird distribution, the only sign of the considerable 

 effort undertaken by the Pacific Ocean Biological Sur- 

 vey Project, financed by the Department of Defense. 

 It ultimately turned out that the department was con- 

 cerned with distribution of animals as a facet of bio- 

 logical warfare. The issue of classified scientific work 

 in the Natural History Building was fought on this 

 battlefield, and now officially every study engaged in 

 by the staff must be pubhshable in the open literature. 



The rotunda of fices on the second floor are as small 

 as those on the third floor, but noisier and even more 

 high-ceilinged. At least one of these rooms has been 

 used to store whale bones. Currently they are occupied 

 by some people involved in Information Resources 

 Management, an office formed in I98I. 



Following the modification of the will of Henry Ward, 

 which permitted his collection to be rearranged, some 

 of his life-size bronze statues were moved to the second- 

 floor rotunda balcony, where they are shifted from spot 

 to spot. After the National Collection of Fine Arts re- 

 moved its paintings from this balcony in the 1960s, the 

 area became a place for temporary exhibits. These ex- 

 hibits, changing every few months, always have some 

 sort of natural history theme. Most commonly they are 

 photographs or scientific illustrations by non- 

 Smithsonian artists; and because of the prestige asso- 

 ciated with having a show at the Museum of Natural 

 History, there is a considerable competition for the 

 space. One exhibit of 1984 celebrated the fiftieth an- 

 niversary of the publication of Roger Tory Peterson's 

 A Field Guide to the Birds; in 1979 the 100th anniversary 

 of the U.S. Geological Survey was celebrated with a 

 display of the scientific illustrations of William Henry 



186 



The Museum 



