26 



FIFTY YEARS OF MUSEUM WORK 



night after night skinning greasy sea fowl and then trying to get the 

 skins dry was quite another matter. 



Field photography was in its infancy, in the stage when it was not so 

 difficult to photograph a bird in the open as it was to find the bird in the 

 photograph. As late as 1890, Mr. Dutcher, at a meeting of the American 

 Ornithologists' Union, pointed with pride to a photograph of a gull, 

 stating that it was his one success in 150 negatives. 



While there was much field work in connection with the Fur Seal 

 Commission of 1896 and 1897, yet the members of the party were com- 

 fortably housed in the villages of St. Paul and St. George. 



In passing it may be said that the conclusions reached by that Com- 

 mission have been fully borne out by the observations of others and 

 especially by the results of the cessation of pelagic sealing. 



My one great desire to charter a schooner and cruise through the 

 Pacific Islands on a collecting trip was never realized, and only today, 

 half a century later, is such work being carried on. There were few mil- 

 lionaires in my earlier days and still fewer patrons of scientific work. 



My last work for the U. S. National Museum was in 1903-04 in 

 connection with the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, when I was des- 

 patched to Newfoundland to secure the cast and skeleton of a fully 

 grown blue or sulphur-bottom whale, a commission that with the aid 

 of my associates, Messrs. William Palmer and J. W. Scolhck, was suc- 

 cessfully executed. 



This work involved a stay of nearly two months at the whaling 

 station at Balena on the south coast of Newfoundland and afforded an 

 excellent opportunity to obtain information in regard to three species of 

 whales. Incidentally it led later to the making of the fine model in the 

 American Museum of Natural History which was based on the measure- 

 ments and information then obtained. 



The worst part of this work was the fear of failure, the worry lest we 

 did not get a good big whale, and there were some anxious days when no 

 sulphur-bottoms were taken or even seen. We had been assured that 

 whales eighty or more feet long were caught at Balena and when we 

 measured whale after whale and nothing over seventy-five feet turned up, 

 and few of that length even, there was cause for anxiety. As we found 

 later, the length of the large whales had been estimated by standing on 

 one side of the "slip" and noting the distance on a fence the other side 

 of the whale, the attendant parallax giving the whale several additional 

 feet in length. 



