Annual Report of Zoological Museum

The annual report of the Museum of Comparative Zoology to the President and Fellows of Harvard College has been issued by Mr. Samuel Henshaw h.'03, curator. The Museum has received for an addition to its invested funds the sum of $5,000, the gift of Miss Maria Whitney. The income of the money will be applied to the care and increase of the Whitney Library, the volumes of which were brought together in great part by Miss Whitney's brother, Josiah Dwight Whitney, Sturgis-Hooper professor of geology from 1875 to 1896.

From Dr. P. R. Uhler, the Museum has received the Meyer Duehr series of European hemiptera. This collection contains a very large number of species determined by Dr. Franz Fieber. Another gift of great scientific value has been received from Dr. G. W. Peckham and Mrs. Elizabeth G. Peckham; it consists of a considerable number of attidae, or jumping spiders. Mr. Thomas Barbour has presented the Museum with collections from India, Burmah, the Dutch East Indies, and New Guinea, which have enriched the study series of specimens in every department. Among the more notable of these, is a series of skins of birds of paradise, and of a number of magnificent specimens of the great bird-winged butterflies.

Other important additions are: a series of spiders from Miss Elizabeth B. Bryant; several interesting memorials of William Dandridge Peck, of the class of 1782, America's first scientific entomologist and the University's first professor of natural history, received from his grand-daughter, Miss Mary D. Peck; a collection of mammals from Lower California and Central and Western China; a series of Icelandic birds, from Messrs. J. W. Hastings and L. J. deG. Milhau; a number of mammalian heads and horns and the mount of a male caribou from Dr. W. L. Smith M.'92; a specimen of an African tortoise and two large monitors from the New York Zoological Society; and a series of Hawaiian corals from the American Museum of Natural History.

In the department of geology and geography, Professor R. DeC. Ward '89 announces that the Bosch-Omori seismograph, or "tromometer," has been installed, but that, on account of difficulties experienced in the rusting of important wires which support the pendulum, the arrangements for measuring the exact time of earthquakes are unsatisfactory. It is hoped soon to obviate this difficulty.

Professor J. B. Woodworth '94, now on the Shaler Memorial Expedition in South America, will spend the rainy season in Chile, between Valdivia and Valparaiso, in an investigation of shore-line changes.