24 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 
leaving the latter as a presentation of the administrative 
and scientific results attained each year.* 
From the Secretary’s annual printed statements it appears 
that the cost of publishing and distributing the annual 
Reports thus far has been as follows :— 
1890, 1891. 1892. 1893. 1894. 1895. 1896, Total. 
$1,493 65. $1,465 05. $1,820 61. $2,272 09. $1,849 87. $1,275 31. $2,848 46. $13,025 04. 
This expenditure, averaging $1,860.72 per year, which 
includes the expense of a reissue of the first volume in 
1893, and of the second and third volumes in 1896, has 
secured a first edition of 1,500 copies of each Report, and 
500 copies of each reissue, enabling us to place sets in 
nearly or quite all of the centers of botanical research in the 
world, while the provision of a few hundred reprints of 
each of the more important scientific articles has rendered 
it possible for any botanist who really cared to use them to 
obtain the latter. 
While wasteful distribution of the Garden publications 
has been avoided, as far as possible, and the Reports have 
been sent to permanent libraries, rather than individuals, 
except where special reason to the contrary existed, direct 
payment or an exchange equivalent is not demanded where 
there is reason to believe that they will be preserved in 
accessible places or used in serious botanical study. Asa 
result of this policy, it is believed that papers published in 
the Garden Reports are within the reach of more working 
botanists than those printed in any other publication, at 
any rate on this side of the Atlantic. 
Notwithstanding the liberal policy adopted in the distri- 
bution of the Garden publications, the object being to 
render them accessible wherever they were likely to be 
useful, rather than to see that they were not a source of 
expense to the Garden, they have now become the recog- 
* Sixth Report, 3. 
