Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/477

Rh and the material are, to a great extent, obtainable from the catalogues and the museum of Prof. Ward.

A recent examination of this establishment has suggested a brief sketch of its nature, its capacity for supplying the want above indicated, and of the additions which might advantageously be introduced.

Prof. Ward was a pupil of Agassiz, and afterward Professor of Natural History in Rochester University, where he formed a very extensive and well-arranged museum of geology, mineralogy, paleontology, and zoölogy. Desiring to include with this fac-similes of unique fossils in other museums, Prof. Ward spent three years in Europe, and gradually accumulated moulds of famous fossils. The great expense of this undertaking (nearly $20,000) determined him to make duplicates of the casts, and thus, by degrees, originated the now well-known "Ward Series of Casts of Fossils;" and at present, in many of our educational institutions, large and small, the megatherium, iguanodon, ichthyosaurus, and pterodactyl have become as familiar forms as the professors themselves.

The usefulness of this branch of the establishment is now generally recognized, and, with the mineralogical department, has been graphically described by others, so we may pass to the consideration of what has been and may be accomplished by Prof. Ward for the furnishing of zoölogical museums.

At present, mounted insects and stuffed birds receive but little of his attention, but the collections embrace representatives of the leading groups of the whole animal kingdom, more than 13,000 species being represented. The echinoderms and crustacea, being easily preserved in a dry state, are very numerous. They have recently been carefully rearranged and determined by a professional naturalist.

Prof. Ward keeps twenty-two advertisements in foreign journals, and has correspondents in all parts of the globe, near and remote, so that scarcely a week passes without his receiving word of the sending to him of rare forms.

At the time of our visit he was receiving the results of a late trip to Europe (where he had expended about $10,000 for specimens). On the same day arrived the skins and skeletons of two camels, the one from Asia Minor, the other from Turkey. The taxidermists were engaged upon a grizzly bear, a 1,000-pound turtle, and the now-famous donkey which slew a lion in Cincinnati; while the osteologists were mounting a whale's skeleton for the Peabody Academy of Science at Salem, Massachusetts, and would then commence upon a large series of skeletons for the Smithsonian Institution.

A specimen of the rare tiger-shark (Crossorhinus dasypogon) had just arrived from Australia.

Ten men are constantly employed in the reception and