124 
mittee, realizing the urgency of our need, and believing firmly 
in the value of our work to this city, as well as to education and 
sceince in general, secured private funds to the amount of $100,- 
ooo on the condition that the city appropriate corporate stock in 
the same amount for the completion of our buildings, and other 
permanent improvements of the Garden. The terms of the gift 
were accepted by the city administration, the corner stone was 
laid just one year ago tomorrow (April 20, 1916), and tonight 
we dedicate the building. 
One cannot help but recall at this time how very recent is the 
development of scientific laboratories. By whatever way you 
came to this building this evening you were dependent for your 
transportation upon an electro-magnet; electro-magnetism was 
discovered by Faraday in 1831, and the laboratory in which he 
worked was the only research laboratory then in existence. The 
epoch-making discoveries of the great French physiologist, Claude 
Bernard (about 1870), were made in the damp, unsanitary cellars 
of the College de France. It was indeed impossible, says M. 
Vallery-Radot, to dignify these cellars by the name of laos 
tories; Bernard himself called them “ scientists’ graves” 
mopeds name, for it was Pasteur’s opinion that the disease hich 
caused the death of Bernard was induced by the unhealthful 
conditions in which he was obliged to work. The laboratory of 
the Sorbonne was equally bad, dark and damp, and several feet 
below the level of the street. As late as 1871* there was no 
botanical laboratory of any sort in the United States. The 
museum and laboratory building of our sister institution, the New 
York Botanical Garden, completed in April, 1901, was the first 
building of any considerable magnitude in this country con- 
structed for the sole purpose of botanical instruction and research, 
What a change, and what an appropriate and heartening change, 
in the past twenty-five or thirty years, for now all of our better 
colleges and universities are planning adequate housing for their 
* The first botanical laboratory in the United States for undergraduate 
instruction was introduced at Iowa Agricultural College (Ames) by the 
late Professor C. E. Bessey, in 1873. The laboratory method for advanced 
students is ee to have been introduced the year previous at Harvard, but 
this was unknown to Bessey. 
