RICHAED RATHBUN — BENJAMIN. 525 
which service he then continued until 1896. At first the collections 
of the Fish Commission were preserved in the museum of Yale Uni- 
versity in the custody of Prof. A. E. Verrill, to whom he was detailed 
as assistant, serving also at that time as assistant in zoology at Yale 
University. 
In 1880, owing to the approaching completion of the United States 
National Museum building, Mr. Rathbun was transferred from New 
Haven to Washington and brought with him a part of the collections 
which had been stored at the former place. At that time he was made 
curator of the department of marine invertebrates in the National 
Museum, an appointment which he continued to hold until 1914. 
As the Fish Commission grew, much of the administrative work 
was assigned to Mr. Rathbun by Secretary Baird and the respon- 
sibility steadily increased until Baird's death in 1887. Meanwhile, 
although Professor Verrill of Yale was the nominal head of the sum- 
mer investigations of the Fish Commission, during much of the time 
Mr. Rathbun had active charge of the laboratories, steamers, and 
equipment and was responsible for the general management of the 
work. The collections were mostly assorted under his supervision 
for distribution to specialists. His own studies at that time related 
to the commercial fisheries and to the working up of the natural his- 
tory of several groups of invertebrates. 
During 1880 and 1881 he was employed upon the fishery investiga- 
tions of the Tenth Census and reported on the natural history of, and 
the fisheries for, the commercial lobsters, crabs, shrimps, corals, and 
sponges ; the marine fishing grounds of North America with the ocean 
temperatures of the Atlantic coast of the United States. Much of 
this material appeared in " The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of 
the United States," which was prepared through the cooperation 
of the Commissioner of Fisheries and the Superintendent of the 
Tenth Census under the direction of George Brown Goode. Mr. 
Rathbun's contributions to these official reports amounted to 550 
quarto pages with 106 plates. 
Incidental to his work at this period was his association with col- 
leagues in the gathering of material for the Great International Fish- 
eries Exhibition held in London in 1884. He prepared and described 
the " Collection of Economic Crustaceans, Worms, Echinoderms and 
Sponges " * and he was the author of the " Descriptive Catalogue of 
the Collection illustrating the Scientific Investigation of the Sea and 
Fresh Waters." ' 
In 1891, at the request of the Secretary of State, he assisted John 
W. Foster in preparing material for the United States case at the 
Paris fur-seal tribunal. He had the services of several experts, and 
•Bull. 27, U. S. Nat. Mus., pp. 107-137. ''Idem, pp. 511-622. 
