January 1st, 1916



My dear Douglass;



I returned from Washington this morning, having had quite enough fo the Second Pan-American Scientific Congress, to which I was a delegate.  After all there is no place like home.



While in Washinton I made it a point to call upon the Secretary of the Interior, and to run down the matter of our tenure of the land in which we have been working for the past years.  I ahd the whole file of papers before me and read all the correspondence.  Without attempting to go over the multiplicity of details involved int he matter, I amy epitomize by saying that the making of the land covered by our Mineral Claim into a National Monument was based as it was explained to me, up on the fact that after having disallowed our claim, the only way to protect us from designing private individuals was to withdraw the land in the way which has been done.  Now it happends that under the act of 1906 the oversitht of the so-called National Monuments had been relegated to the Bureau of Ethonology.  Therefore all the paers, including my application for permission to coninue our work went over to that Bureau.   They receoginzed that dinosaurs are not archelogical objects.   Teh papers were accordingly sent over to the Geological Survey and to Dr. Walcott of the Smithsonian Institution.   Walcott had been busy, and so had George Otis Smith the head of the Geological Survey. I saw both of them and urged prompt action, and both of them have assured me that they will do their part, and recommend that we be allowed to go on with our work.  They both insist that parties who are doing this kind of work shall not paly the part of the dog in the manger, but shall carry on the work vigorously.  We need no admoniton to do so, but it appears that ceratin parties in