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ideas also know that in nature desirable forms are often widely 
scattered ; and for the city dweller it is no small task to locate in 
the country material that he or she may desire. Many plants, 
moreover, are seasonal, while others are very restricted in their 
range and occurrence. 
Few realize that there is assembled and available, in living form 
and as reference material, a great wealth of plant specimens within 
the limits of the City of New York, at the New York Botanical 
Garden in the Bronx and at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. In 
both institutions distinct advantages are presented in the as- 
sembling, within limited areas, of great collections of plant species, 
so that one may find not only local plants but also exotics from all 
over the world. 
Attention is especially directed not so much to the plants growing 
out of doors as to the largely tropical, often bizarre plants cul- 
tivated in the garden conservatories; ferns and cycads, bananas 
and palms, orchids and bromeliads, showy flowering shrubs and 
attractive annuals, aquatic plants, cacti in multitudinous forms 
from the drier parts of North and South America, strange suc- 
culents from South Africa, and remarkable aroids from the tropics 
of both hemispheres. Nowhere in nature will one find assembled 
in such a compact area so many diverse forms as in these two 
botanical gardens. 
There is still another source that remains practically untouched, 
and that is the extensive collections of mounted specimens in the 
herbaria of these two institutions. In the herbarium of the New 
York Botanical Garden there are approximately two million speci- 
mens, and in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden important collections 
of asimilar kind. While much of this material does not lend itself 
to the purpose under discussion, yet in special groups, such as the 
tropical ferns, many strange and attractive forms are represented. 
A few weeks ago an artist was looking up illustrations of oaks 
in our library. It developed that she had been commissioned to 
prepare a design for a dining-room ceiling, based on oak leaves 
and acorns representing species characteristic of the two hemi- 
spheres. The suggestion was made that she examine not the 
published illustrations alone but the herbarium material also. This 
idea proved to be of real service, because she thus had the choice 
