FISHES, REPTILES, AND BATRACHIANS 
UNTIL 1901, there were practically no batrachians and fishes 
on exhibition, and very few reptiles. Lack of space had 
made this necessary, and the accumulations of the preced- 
ing thirty years found storage room only. The collection of reptiles 
and batrachians up to this time consisted of specimens received from 
the Department of Parks and the Zoological Society, a number col- 
lected on Museum expeditions to Florida, Mexico, and Cuba, thirty- 
seven reptiles and batrachians from the Island of Trinidad, twenty- 
five from Utah, Wyoming, and Nebraska, and 110 collected in 
Sumatra. Fifty snakes, 40 lizards, and 125 embryos of loggerhead 
turtles, collected in Florida, were presented by Dr. Charles Stover 
Allen in 1893. In 1899 Colonel Nicholas Pike presented his large 
collection of reptiles and batrachians containing about 1,300, mostly 
from Long Island, New York. 
The collection of fishes was very small, and consisted mainly of 
painted wax and plaster models, which resembled but slightly the 
fish in nature. Most of these were received in a collection purchased 
from the Smithsonian Institution in 1886 ($727). It contained 
colored casts of eighteen species of fish and fourteen species of rep- 
tiles. A series of fishes collected by Professor Agassiz was presented 
by the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, in 1876, and 
other specimens were received from time to time through the United 
States Fish Commission. 
Fishes. When the present Department of Invertebrate Zoology was es- 
tablished in 1901, the collections of fishes and reptiles were placed in 
its charge. Exhibition space was assigned for them, and efforts 
toward an attractive exhibition series were at once begun. All known 
methods of preserving and exhibiting fishes were unsatisfactory, so 
experiments along this line were begun, and have continued with 
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