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reading room balcony of four wooden bookcases. Together with 
the four bookcases installed late in 1940 these provided ninety- 
six shelves for the immediate expansion of the periodical and 
classified collection. Before many years, however, the problem 
of additional space for the library will again present itself. Fora 
library is not static but expands through the normal purchase, 
exchange, and gift of material. 
An outstanding gift during the year was that of twelve vol- 
umes given by the Pierrepont family of Brooklyn. This included 
the beautifully illustrated Indigenous Flowers of the Hawaiian 
Islands, painted and described by Mrs. Francis Sinclair. An 
early Dutch herbal, Stephen Blankaart’s De Nederlandschen 
herbarius . . . Amsterdam, 1714, was given by Mrs. Henry J. 
Davenport. This copy contains the signature and notes of 
John B, Zabriskie, who practiced medicine in Brooklyn during 
the early years of the nineteenth century. Mr. Alain White 
presented the two-volume work The Succulent Euphorbieae 
(Southern Africa), of which he is joint author with R. A. Dyer 
and B. L. Sloane. Mr. C. C. Hanmer of East Hartiord,.<on- 
necticut, gave a file of three hundred numbers of botanical peri- 
odicals which, as they are duplicates of items in the library, will 
be very useful for exchange purposes. These were in addition 
to twenty-one items new to the library. By supplying material 
from their personal sets members of the staff have made possible 
the completion of the library's files of some periodical items. 
Also in this way a duplicate set of the Bulletin of the Torrey 
Botanical Club and of Torreya were assembled for deposit in the 
Herbarium. There also were extensive donations by staff mem- 
bers, especially of pamphlets new to the library collection. 
Two volumes containing copies of translations of articles origi- 
nally published in the French, German, Russian, Dutch, Spanish, 
Portuguese and Italian languages were presented by Mr. Willard 
M. Porterfield, head of the New York office of the Division of 
Hilleculture, Soil Conservation Service of the United States De- 
partment of Agriculture. These supplement two volumes pre- 
sented previously. Since 1938 the library’s collection of foreign 
periodicals has been utilized in this project’s search for data on 
plants which might be adapted for use in soil conservation. This 
