ABSTRACT
In the beginning, the "Smithsonian museum" was provided for exclusively from the Smithson fund, but this arrangement soon proved inadequate, and Henry early began to petition Congress for help. The job of the numerous curators at the National Museum of Natural History is essentially to take care of the collections. The work includes cataloguing, identifying, and classifying acquisitions, conducting research on the division collections, overseeing publication of research results, playing host to outside investigators, and keeping abreast of the literature in their areas. The job of a museum of natural history is to preserve and portray the record of the living world, of man and his environment. Within the National Museum of Natural History, the Department of Botany administers the United States National Herbarium, a quasi-official name for an organization whose origins date from the founding of the Smithsonian.
