26 
It was Mr. White who secured, in 1909, the initial endowment 
of $50,000 required by the City of New York as a condition for 
entering into the cooperative agreement for the establishment and 
maintenance of the Garden on park lands of the city. In a sim- 
ilar manner he gave in part, and secured from others, in I9QI5, 
the fund of $100,000 which resulted in the appropriation of a 
like amount by the city for the completion of our laboratory 
and administration building. This was just prior to the entrance 
of the United States into the World War, and, as a consequence, 
at the beginning of a series of lean years’ for the city. It is 
almost certain that but for this munificent gift we should still be 
without our completed building, and the rapid expansion of our 
work since 1917, which the building made possible, would still be 
only an unrealized hope. 
Mr. White’s conception of the significance and value of the 
Botanic Garden to Brooklyn indicates, at one and the same time, 
his active interest in the city and in science and education. This 
conception is admirably expressed in a letter which he sent to the 
director to be read on the occasion of the visit to the Botanic Gar- 
den of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce on June 5, 1920.* 
The letter read, in part, as follows: 
“T am very sorry that I shall not be present tomorrow afternoon 
to extend a greeting to my many friends of the Brooklyn Chamber 
of Commerce, who I hope will gather at the Botanic Garden. 
“ And I regret to lose this opportunity to say to a select body of 
fellow citizens something of the relation which the Botanic Garden 
stands in to the community. It has been our good fortune, within 
the last few years, to bring into public use and enjoyment forty 
acres of land owned by the city which had lain practically waste 
for fifty years, but a still greater good seems to me to be achieved 
in educating the taste of thousands of school children and adults in 
lines destined to make our city and borough more beautiful, and in 
developing the taste for the study of nature in many of its forms. 
“The eagerness of the community, young and old, to make use 
* Owing to an unusually severe storm the attendance at this es 
was so small that the formal exercises were dispensed with, and the lette 
above quoted was, therefore, not read. more successful meeting of i 
Chamber of Commerce was held in 1921. 
