State Museum of Natural History. 49 



The Museum needs more space and more cases for the proper 

 exhibition of its material, aud for the storage, in easily accessible 

 quarters, of its duplicates, which are needed for the illustration of 

 local characters and occurrences, and for distribution and exchanges. 

 Beginning with the principal floor, the mineralogical collection 

 fills the rooms allotted to it, leaving no space for the growth 

 which must take place to be worthy of its place in a State 

 Museum. The entrance hall is already crowded with blocks of 

 stone from the quarries, and there is no available space for the 

 exhibition of cabinet specimens representing all of our quarries, 

 nearly all of which are on hand, packed away in the basement. 

 The same statement is applicable to the iron ores of the State. 

 The collection of these ores, recently obtained, also awaits a 

 place. In the second and third stories the cases are full, and 

 there is no space in which to place the several fine and 

 valuable collections of rocks which belong to the Museum. 

 The construction of two double table cases for the third- 

 story room is necessary to accommodate the palseontological 

 collections acquired during the year. Of course, here, as 

 in the mineralogical rooms, the removal of inferior material 

 and its replacement by better and more valuable specimens 

 affords relief to some extent, and makes an improvement in the 

 exhibition. But for study and convenient reference a museum 

 needs the representation of localities and many local collections, 

 as well as fine examples of species and large general collections. 

 Often these local collections are the most important in the illus- 

 tration of local, characteristics, and the determination of questions 

 of purely scientific as well as of a practical nature. On the top 

 floor of the Museum the space still unoccupied in the floor cases 

 is reserved for the additional birds which are needed to fill the 

 wide gaps in that collection. There is no more case room for 

 exhibition of the skeletons, necessary to illustrate the vertebrate 

 forms, nor for the growing collections of shells, corals and alco- 

 holics. At the present rate of growth the accommodation of the 

 accessions to our collections is a standing problem, which is only 

 half solved. Assuming an increasing rate, as is fitting, solution 

 seems an impossibility within our present limits. 



I am respectfully yours, 



JOHN C. SMOCK, 

 Assistant in Charge of the State Museum of Nat. History, 

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