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With the completion of these new buildings the Botanic Garden 
is enabled, upon a larger scale and with greater efficiency, to go 
on with its appointed work. I can conceive of no institution 
likely to be of greater benefit in such a community as ours. Here 
nature can be studied under the open sky, or in commodious green- 
houses where exotics can be maintained. A knowledge of trees, 
so interesting in their variety, can here be obtained. The wonder- 
ful life and habits of growing plants can here be seen in all their 
curious manifestations, and their manifold beauty of shape and 
color can be observed and admired. To those whose inclination 
leads them thus to pursue the study of nature in their hours of 
leisure a new world of marvelous interest and beauty is opened. 
In the Botanic Garden these advantages are freely offered to the 
public. 
The benefit and attractiveness of the Garden to children has 
already been well demonstrated. The interest of growing plant 
life to young minds is almost universal, especially when that 
natural inclination is well directed. Here the nature studies of 
the schools become living realities. The children return to their 
lessons in school with far greater interest and appreciation after 
having come in contact with the living forms to be found in the 
Garden. 
An advantage of the Garden of a very different and much more 
practical character is in its capacity to give valuable information 
to those who wish to raise vegetables and other kinds of food 
products from the land. In a year such as this, when there is a 
shortage of food, and when all who can are urged by the public 
authorities to cultivate the land to the utmost, the Botanic Garden, 
with the useful information and instruction which it has to offer, 
becomes a valuable asset and of great public importance. 
While it is to be expected that in the nature of things by far 
the larger part of the activities of the Botanic Garden will be of 
the general character of those to which I have referred—that is to 
say, those capable of giving direct and immediate benefit to the 
public—may I not indulge the hope that in the quiet of the inner 
recesses of this building the pursuit of pure science may go on? 
And let us not say that those who, in the laboratory or otherwise, 
are engaged in such study are leading useless lives, even though 
