Abstract
THE report of the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution for the year ended June 30, 1938, refers to the completion in June of two full years of the Smithsonian radio programme in co-operation with the United States Office of Education (Publication 3489. Pp. viii + 117. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1938). These educational broadcasts have covered the various fields of the Institution's activities—science, invention, history and art-and have been widely popular. An outstanding accession to the National Museum has been a collection of molluscs obtained through the Francis Lea Chamberlain fund, which numbered more than a million specimens. Numerous specimens were brought back for the National Zoological Park by the National Geographic Society-Smithsonian Expedition to the East Indies. The Bureau of American Ethnology dispatched an expedition to South America to make extensive studies of the Indian tribes of the western part of that continent. The Division of Radiation and Organisms has developed an improved method for measuring plant growth substances concerned in the bending of plants towards the light, as well as a new automatic apparatus for measuring and recording photosynthesis continually, and an apparatus for the determination of chorophyll. The Smithsonian solar observing station on Mount St. Katherine in Egypt was abandoned, and construction of a new station on Burro Mountain, near Tyrone, New Mexico, was begun.The Astrophysical Observa-tory has undertakenthe re-computation of all solar-constant valuesfrcfm 1923 to the present time.
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The Smithsonian Institution. Nature 143, 595–596 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/143595d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/143595d0