1924] Robinson,—Miss Day 43 
The establishment was then housed in a small story-and-a-half 
brick structure between the Gray frame residence and a small labora- 
tory and auditorium, which in their turn adjoined the conservatories. 
Inadequate as was its building, the Herbarium was even less well 
endowed than housed, and at the time was meeting a rather appalling 
annual deficit. The library, already notable from the rarity of many 
of its works, was sadly cramped in shelving and had grown Topsy 
fashion, books being inserted on the principle of temporary conveni- 
ence rather than any logical system. "The previous librarian, Miss 
Clark, well trained at the Albany Library School, had sought to bring 
it into order, but her tenure had been short, the cramped conditions 
had hampered progress, and she had never been given much freedom 
in making changes in the shelving. Conditions could not have been 
. very encouraging for a new incumbent. However, Miss Day took 
up her work with good courage. 
The Curator was then engaged in completing, editing and preparing 
for press the posthumous manuscripts of Dr. Asa Gray and Dr. 
Sereno Watson in continuation of the Synoptical Flora of North Amer- 
ica and had one fascicle fairly advanced. Miss Day was given as her 
initial task the verification of some 5000 bibliographical references 
in this work! In later years she often referred to this with amusement 
but admitted that no more immediate or effective plunge into her 
new activities could have been devised. It had been her own wish 
to begin with the cataloguing and reshelving of the library, but as 
she afterwards testified she could have done no very satisfactory 
work in such ways until she had acquired practice in the actual 
use of a technical reference library, and just this exercise in the 
verification of many citations gave her the needful experience, teach- 
ing her the relative importance of different works, the meaning of 
countless abbreviations, the significance of synonymy, the geographic 
relation of floras, value of priority in nomenclature, and such matters 
fundamental to scientific taxonomy. 
She plowed through this task conscientiously and with great 
patience and good humor, quickly recognizing errors when called to 
her attention and not rarely suggesting improvements in the citations. 
She was almost immediately interested in the work and alert to per- 
fect its details. She studied punctuation and typography as a fine 
art and soon came to have a correct feeling for all such matters, 
which made her later very expert as a proof-reader. 
