Thomas Barbour
Published: 2017-11-19
Total Pages: 70
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Excerpt from Annual Report of the Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoölogy at Harvard College to the President of Harvard College for 1933-1934 Since the foundation of the Museum Palaeontology here has usually meant Invertebrate Palaeontology. This was natural, because invertebrate material could be collected more economi cally and stored more compactly than vertebrate material and, moreover, Louis and Alexander Agassiz were both deeply in terested in the invertebrate field and bought several great collec tions in Europe which at once established this Museum as a natural center for investigators of many invertebrate groups. Of the vertebrates the fishes were the only favored class. Here again the same reasons produced the same results and the Museum has long been noted for its resources and investigations and in recent years, especially, concerning the early and very primitive fishes. Some years ago it became obvious that our collections were badly out of balance and the needs of students interested in stratigraphic geology, as well as comparative anatomy, made it clear that we must have a better representation of the other groups and, although inadequately equipped to do so, I have been myself fussing with Palaeontology for some years. The result, however, has been eminently satisfactory inasmuch as we now have material sufficient to warrant our inviting a Vertebrate Palaeontologist interested in the higher groups to come here and work. Alfred Sherwood Romer has joined the Staff of the Museum as well as that of the Division of Biology. He offers no course this year but will spend his time organizing the collections so that they may be profitably used in connection with his teaching next year and he has some most promising investigations already under way. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.