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Letters , Extracts, and Notes. 
XVII.— Letters, Extracts , and Notes. 
We have received the following letters addressed “ To the 
Editors of 4 The Ibis J :— 
Sirs, — I thank you for your kind inquiries in regard to 
our new Californian Museum. The following information in 
regard to it you are welcome to use as you please. 
About two years ago Miss Annie M. Alexander, of Oak¬ 
land, agreed to give $7,000 yearly for seven years to equip 
and maintain a 44 Museum of Vertebrate Zoology/’ on con¬ 
dition that the Regents of the University should provide a 
suitable building. The plans for the building as finally 
determined upon, with its equipment, called for about 
$14,000. 
The building, now completed, stands north of California 
Eield and adjoins on the east the new Fertilizer Control 
Laboratory. Externally it is a rectangular structure one 
hundred and five feet long by fifty feet wide, covered with 
corrugated galvanized iron. Within, the southern portion 
of the ground floor has been built as an exhibition hall, fifty 
feet by seventy-five feet, open to a skylight in the roof above, 
with a gallery on all sides twelve feet in width at the second 
floor level. In this hall will be mounted a number of groups 
of large Californian mammals, arranged in semblance to 
their natural surroundings, with backgrounds painted by 
Carlos Hittell, the San Francisco artist. The groups are 
now being made by Mr. John Rowley, formerly taxidermist 
of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, 
employed here for this purpose by the managers of the 
Alexander fund. The groups when completed will stand 
behind plate glass under the light, so that visitors will see 
them from beneath the gallery. In this way the best 
possible advantage will be taken of the lighting effects, as 
there will be no reflection from the glass of the cases. 
In the gallery, on the second floor, are to be arranged the 
storage-cases of research-collections, and perhaps later on a 
