making copperplates and electrotypes. More than 1,700 repairs were made to instruments, and 273 new copperplates and 35 electrotypes were finished.

PHOTOGRAPHIC LABORATORY,

The output of the laboratory included 14,194 negatives, of which 13,087 were glass and 1,107 were paper; 42,763 prints, of which 11,650 were map prints and 31,113 were mat prints; and 1,411 lantern slides.

ADMINISTRATIVE BRANCH.

EXECUTIVE DIVISION.

Correspondence, records, appointments, supplies, and shipments.— The total amount of work performed in this section was considerably greater than that for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1907. The scope of the work of the section has been enlarged (1) by the appointment of a purchasing clerk, whose duty it is to make arrangements for purchases of all material procured at Washington in the open market, and to issue the orders therefor; (2) by the establishment of a “follow-up" system on all correspondence recorded in the section; (3) by the recording of a greater proportion of the letters received; (4) by the establishment in the section of the sales offices for local cash sales of Survey publications; (5) by the establishment of a system of cost keeping; and (6) by the increased number of letters filed. Moreover, the general growth of the Survey manifests itself at every desk in this section.

Mails, files, and records.-During the year 107,283 pieces of mail were received, an increase of 2 per cent over the number for the previous fiscal year. Of this mail, 20,218 pieces, an increase of more than 10 per cent over the number for 1907, contained remittances for sale publications of the Survey.

The recording and filing of correspondence required the services of three clerks throughout the greater part of the year. The number of letters mailed through the section was 66,860, of which 17,509 were registered.

Personnel.-In the roster of secretarial appointments 916 changes were made and recorded during the year, as compared with 1,002 in. the previous year. Of these changes 335 were new appointments, 147 separations (4 by death), 247 promotions, and 9 reductions. The remaining 178 changes were such as not to affect the total number of employees or the pay rolls, and included extensions of limited appointments, changes of title, changes from annual to per diem rating or the reverse, the designation of disbursing agents, etc. The decrease in the number of changes recorded is accounted for by the change in the department method of making probationary appointments absolute. There are now on the rolls of the Survey 840 names, an increase of 188, or 28.8 per cent.

An average of 1,250 applications for leave were handled per month, or 15,000 for the year. These covered 11,331 days of annual leave and 2,428 days of sick leave, being 55 per cent of the amount of annual leave and 12 per cent of the amount of sick leave which it is permissible to grant under the law; also 8,508 days of leave without pay. The above figures of leave without pay do not cover the transfers to state pay rolls, nor do they include 64 indefinite furloughs, which were made in December for employees of the technologic branch.

Property accountability. During the year the system of property accountability by custodians for various branches and divisions was continued and, in addition, a custodian of office property was designated to make an inventory of all nonexpendable property in Washington. This inventory was nearly completed at the end of the year. The amount derived from the sale at public auction of property examined by inspectors and found unserviceable was $1,418.77. During the preceding fiscal year it was $2,946.29.

Express and freight.-During the year 4,750 pieces of express and freight, of which 1,092 pieces were outgoing and 3,658 pieces were received, were handled by the shipping clerk, who also checked 641 freight and express accounts.

Purchase and distribution of supplies.-The present system concentrates in this section all operations connected with purchases in Washington, such as procuring bids, issuing orders, and preparing vouchers, and requires the services of three persons during most of the time. During the year 2,220 requisitions were handled, which involved the drawing of 2,360 orders. Under the system of drawing the order and preparing the voucher at one operation, the number of vouchers passed was the same as that of orders drawn.

Stationery. In the stationery room the services of three men are required for handling mails, delivering supplies throughout the office and packing and shipping them to the field parties, and keeping an account of the charges for stationery supplies. During the year 8,913 requisitions for blanks, blank books, and miscellaneous supplies were filled from stock on hand and 447 requisitions were drawn on the department for supplies. In addition to this work, 613 requisitions for printing were made on the department, and 397 requisitions for furniture and supplies.

Administrative bookkeeper.-All transactions of the Survey requiring administrative examination and check are handled by the administrative bookkeeper, who acts in the dual capacity of audit clerk and bookkeeper. A satisfactory system of accounts and doubleentry bookkeeping was adopted at the beginning of the year, the net results of which are given in the following table of classification of disbursements, the repayments shown in the table on page 91 having been deducted.

DIVISION OF DISBURSEMENTS AND ACCOUNTS.

A condensed statement covering the financial transactions of the fiscal year is given below.

Amounts appropriated for and expended by the United States Geological Survey for the fiscal year ended June 30, 1908.

Accessions. Inadequate room in the library has forced the continuance of the policy of discarding books to make room for accessions. During the twenty-six years of its existence the library has acquired, by exchange and otherwise, many valuable works that are not wholly of geologic interest. Although these would not be out of place here if shelf room were ample, they have been removed to make room for works more frequently consulted. More to be regretted was the necessity of discarding, on account of their large size, a number of periodicals, including some mining journals; but the discarded books are transferred to the Library of Congress, where they are cared for and made available for reference.

In the Library of Congress the section of geology is unimportant, this subject being left for the Geological Survey's library to cover. The Survey library is therefore coming to be used more and more by geologic students and writers, both resident in Washington and visiting. The readers in the library this year numbered 8,580, and the books loaned, not including those consulted in the library, 9,279. Owing to the more rigid scrutiny of accessions the increase during the year was less than usual. About 10,000 items, including books, pamphlets, periodicals, and maps, were added. Notable among these

are:

Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society of London, 1878-1898. 21 volumes. Abhandlungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft, Halle, 1853-1906. 22 volumes. Mitteilungen der Ungarischen Geologischen Gesellschaft, 1872-1882.

58695-29 GEOL-OS7

During the year 1,990 complete volumes were added to the accessions record, which on June 30, 1908, shows the library to contain 62,174 volumes. This number is exclusive of the 3,894 numbered volumes that have been transferred to the Library of Congress.

As in past years, the exchange list has been supervised in the library. All publications of the Survey so far as issued have been distributed to its correspondents, from whom a large proportion of the most valuable additions to the library are received, including the transactions of all the known geologic societies of the world, most of the geologic reports issued by governments, many important private monographs, and other publications.

The appropriation of $2,000 for purchase of books enables the library to acquire about 70 periodicals, the principal new publications of geologic interest, and occasionally to add, through purchase from second-hand dealers, some rare out-of-print works long needed. Catalogue.-About one-sixth of the contents of the library have now been completely catalogued, and printed entries therefor have been incorporated in the card catalogue. All the rest are briefly entered in the library records, and, being classified on the shelves, are available when called for. The complete cataloguing is continued as rapidly as possible, 6,960' volumes having been catalogued and shelflisted this year.

Practically all the catalogue entries of geologic books (except those of copyrighted books) that are printed on cards for sale by the Library of Congress are supplied by the Survey library, 1,106 of these entries having been furnished during the last year.

A card catalogue of the geologic books in the Library of Congress is also maintained in the library of the Survey, as an adjunct to the catalogue of its own books.

The map catalogue includes about 700 entries, principally of maps published in the United States by the various state surveys, by the Government of Great Britain, and by the geological surveys of Norway and Sweden. It includes also folios of the Geologic Atlas of the United States.