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MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



ical facts that I presume are worth more at this particular 

 stage in the development of the Garden than a more polish- 

 ed statement of the case which left some of those unsaid. 

 For that reason, possibly, what I may be able to say may 

 have some interest and some value. 



Nobody on being called on to assume the direction of an 

 institution which promises so much as this Garden, could 

 fail to bo impressed by the fact that a very considerable 

 part of what the Garden may realize must depend upon the 

 adoption, in the very beginning, of a broad and compre- 

 hensive, and yet very elastic, plan for its development. I 

 am far from feeling able to form such a plan, which must 

 depend upon a good and full knowledge of what may prop- 

 erly bo held to be the functions of such an institution ; but 

 I have thought that possibly it might not be without inter- 

 est if I were to run over two or three of the things that oc- 

 cur to me as important functions of a Garden. 



If this were the time and place for it, I have no doubt 

 that a discussion of the history of botany and botanical 

 gardens might be made to throw a good deal of light on this 

 question, for history has its lessons in science, asTn politics. 

 But I must content myself with saying that the early ideas 

 of botany, and the early botanical gardens, were strictly 

 utilitarian. A botanical friend, a few weeks ago, on his 

 way to Mexico, told me that the simple country peoi3le with 

 whom he is thrown in contact in his botanical tours in the 

 wilder parts of the country, people who have no money to 

 buy drugs with, are extremely interested in the plants which 

 can be used for healing their ailments. They are obliged to 

 look these things up for themselves, and he said that when- 

 ever he collected a plant and was seen doing so he was at 

 once asked '* Que remedio?"— - What does the thing heal ? 

 What is it good for in that way ?' ' A great deal of the early 

 botany and a great many of the early botanical gardens 

 depended upon a considerable interest in this same ques- 

 tion,— the healing virtues, the medical properties, of plants. 

 This is, of course, a strictly utilitarian idea of botany. 



