416 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



gave to the published volumes of Torrey and Gray's Flora their great 

 value. 



With his settlement in Cambridge began in earnest an endeavor to 

 gather together the herbarium and library that were absolutely necessary 

 to the continuation of his work. He had already plants which he had 

 himself collected in New York, New Jersey, and the Alleghanies, speci- 

 mens received from many correspondents throughout the country, and 

 some very valuable contributions from European botanists with whom 

 he was now in intimate and most friendly relationship. In the pre- 

 face to the early Flora acknowledgments are made of such gifts of 

 plants, illustrative of the American flora, from Sir William Hooker, 

 Dr. Richardson, Bentham, Lindley, Arnott, Spach, the elder De Can- 

 dolle, Schlechtendal, Trinius, Bongard, and Lehmann. By a contin- 

 uance of similar liberality on the part of both foreign and home friends, 

 and by purchase from his own limited means (it is impossible now 

 to say in what relative proportions), both herbarium and library gradu- 

 ally grew year by year, until after twenty-two years the house which 

 he occupied became too strait to hold the accumulations. The whole, 

 books and plants together, were then presented to Harvard University, 

 in the building which had been erected for them by Nathaniel Thayer, 

 and a small fund was raised by private subscription affording an income 

 barely sufficing for the most necessary expenses of their care. 



Twenty-four years more have passed, and herbarium and library 

 have more than doubled in extent. Cases for plants have been added 

 once and again, and a large room has been built for the library, in which 

 the shelf-room is already too small. These later accretions have also 

 been for the greater part the gift of Dr. Gray. Through his member- 

 ship in numerous foreign societies, his position as botanical editor of the 

 Journal of Science, and especially his eminence as the great botanist of 

 America, whose acceptance and approval of a work were an honor, 

 many more additions have been made to the library than by purchase 

 with the small amount of money that could be spared for that purpose. 

 And thus the library has grown to be by far the best working botanical 

 library in the United States, though not indeed complete, nor what it 

 needs to be. In like manner the herbarium has from many sources 

 become very general in its character, and there is scarcely an accessible 

 region on the globe whose flora is not to some extent, and often very 

 largely, represented in it, and the number of known genera of phenoga- 

 mous plants of which it does not possess specimens is remarkably 

 small. This has been due mainly to Dr. Gray's wide acquaintance with 

 the botanists of the world, and especially to the close intimacy that has 



