The scope of this institution may be best illustrated by the following extract from the act of incorporation: “To be located in the city of New York for the purpose of establishing and maintaining a botanical garden and museum and arboretum therein, for the collection and culture of plants, flowers, shrubs, and trees, the advancement of botanical science and knowledge, and the prosecution of original research therein and in kindred subjects, for affording instruction in the same, for the prosecution and exhibition of ornamental and decorative horticulture and gardening, and for the entertainment, recreation, and instruction of the people.” The site of the garden embraces an area of such wide diversities of soil and slope, marsh, meadow, shores, and granite ridges, that it will afford peculiarly fitting conditions for the growth of an extensive flora in the open air. As mentioned above, about one thousand species of plants, nearly all of which were native, were found on the inclosed area at the time of organization of the garden. Through a co-operative arrangement entered into with Columbia University, the herbarium of this institution, numbering over six hundred thousand specimens, as well as the library, will be deposited with the garden, and most of the research and graduate work of the university in botany will be carried on in the museum building. The plans of the museum building are such as to offer ample facilities for laboratories in all the divisions of the subject, while the glass houses promise to surpass anything in existence at the present time. The conditions of organization are such that a high efficiency for the entire equipment will be at once attained. The establishment of this garden marks an important step in the development of botany in America.
Perhaps the greatest opportunity for furthering botanical investigation that has existed since the beginning of the science now confronts the American universities in the proposal to establish a botanic garden and laboratory in the tropics. The real value of such an institution may be best understood when it is stated that botany in its present elementary condition, especially with reference to the physiology and ecology of plants, is based chiefly on the results of investigations carried on in botanical gardens and laboratories situated in the northern hemisphere between the parallels of forty and fifty-five degrees. In the herbaria it has been possible to study normal specimens of prepared plants from the equator to the poles, and consequently the systematic relationships are much better known than any other characteristic. Morphology has shared these advantages to some extent.
In the study of the physiology, ecology, and other branches of the science in which living plants are necessary, attention has been
