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botanical work, and in many institutions this ideal has already 
been realized. 
As many of you have already seen, the architects have made 
this a building of great beauty. A well-known magazine re- 
cently published a view of the Woolworth building, in New York, 
entitling the picture “a cathedral of commerce.” And why should 
not commerce, and science which promotes commerce, have their 
beautiful buildings? Nothing has done more to give us a deep 
insight into divine mysteries, to correct false notions of deity, to 
produce a sane and wholesome attitude of mind toward the unt- 
verse and man’s relation thereto than the study of science, espe- 
cially during the past fifty years. I like to think that there is 
something truly significant in the fact that the architectural motive 
of this laboratory building was drawn from churches such as are 
not uncommon in northern Italy. 
But what is this building for, and what is a botanic garden? 
A botanic garden is an institution for the advancement and 
diffusion of a knowledge and love of plants ; the particular purpose 
of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden is the advancement of botany 
and the service of the city. 
But how, you ask, can a botanic garden serve the city? With- 
out hesitation I reply, primarily by the advancement of botany, 
secondarily in many related ways. How the means indicated are 
adequate to achieve the result is still not clear to those who are 
inclined to think of botany, not as a man’s work, asa science funda- 
mental to the oldest and most essential of all human occupations, 
namely agriculture, but merely as a pleasant pastime for young 
ladies in a “finishing school,” or as a rather heroic method of 
learning to recognize a few native wild flowers and to pronounce 
their Latin names. My time is too short and the hour is too late 
for me to go into details, but I may briefly illustrate by citing a 
line of work now in progress here, namely a survey of the 
diseases of the trees and shrubs of Prospect Park and the Botanic 
Garden. During the past ten years the boroughs of Brooklyn 
and Queens have lost chestnut trees. to the value of several hun- 
dred thousand dollars through the ravages of a tree disease which 
no one knows how to combat. Would it not have been worth 
much more than the annual cost of maintenance of both botanic 
