18 
functions, relation to their environment, and classification. Both 
lines of research are important, even for their own sakes and 
without reference to practical ends, and should be promoted by 
such institutions as botanic gardens. Nor should the practical 
ends of plant breeding, crop production, and disease control be 
minimized. 
In an address on Research in Art Museums, delivered before 
the American Association of Museums in 1934, Mr. Henry W. 
Kent, Secretary of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, divided the 
obligations of a museum to provide opportunities for scholarly 
study into three classes: “first, those required to satisfy the needs 
of its staff; second, those required to satisfy the needs of the 
student; third, those essential to its own needs as an _insti- 
tution, if it is to occupy the place of an establishment for 
education.” 
The importance of a program of research at the Brooklyn 
Botanic Garden, from these three angles so well stated by Mr. 
KXent, has been emphasized in various Annual Reports. The 
outstanding perennial need of botanic gardens, considered as 
educational institutions and especially as custodians of extensive 
and valuable collections of living plants, administered for educa- 
tional ends, is more knowledge. To say that this is a public as 
well as an institutional need and responsibility is only to state 
what everyone should realize. And the necessary new knowl- 
edge is, of course, to be obtained only by research. 
The annual loss from plant diseases and pests, in the United 
States alone, has been estimated at a billion and a half dollars. 
Professor Furnas, in his stimulating book, ‘“‘The next hundred 
years,” has calculated that this is at the rate of nearly $3000 a 
minute. The average salary of the leading and more highly 
paid plant pathologists of this country is probably not more than 
$5000 a year—or at the rate of one cent a minute. The American 
Phytopathological Society has about 800 members. The average 
of their salaries is, roughly, not more than $3000. In other 
words, to combat an economic loss of $3000 a minute this entire 
country is expending for personal service about 800 times $3000, 
or $2,400,000—less than $5.00 a minute. 
Reports on research projects for 1937 may be found on pages 
36-58, following. Special attention is called to the continuing 
