For more than ten years the Garden has been dependent on 
— 
annual contributions of funds for much of its research that must 
be considered an integral and permanent part of its work. More- 
over, a valuable and growing collection of living plants, such as the 
Garden now has, requires for its proper care, not only curators of 
plants and horticulturists, but also a department of plant pathology 
responsible for the control of plant diseases in our own collections 
as well as for the prosecution of research in plant pathology. 
Such a department has now become an absolute necessity at the 
srooklyn Botanic Garden, and as soon as possible a permanent 
endowment fund should be provided. Not less than $500,000 of 
the one million dollars of additional endowment needed (see under 
‘ Financial,” infra), is required for the endowment of research in 
pathology and closely related problems. 
The Library 
“Libraries may be considered as part of the laboratory of 
man of science,” said the great French physiologist, Claude 
3ernard, but he hastens to add: “this is on condition that he shall 
read the observations, experiments, and theories of his predecessors 
in order to know them and verify them in nature, and not to find 
opinions ready made in books, thus saving himself the trouble of 
working and of trying to further the investigation of natural 
phenomena.” 
This conception of the purpose of a library in a scientific insti- 
tution, while needing emp 
— 
lasis in 1865, when stated by Claude 
Bernard, is now universally recognized. Since Bernard, however, 
a really stupendous change has taken place in the bulk of biological 
and especially of botanical publication. In 1865, a library of 1000 
volumes would, perhaps, have contained all the really important 
botanical works, while the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, during 1931, 
received the current numbers of 937 periodicals devoted wholly 
or largely to botany, and accessioned 935 bound volumes. Many 
important items could not be purchased for lack of funds. Nine 
hundred and thirty-seven periodicals received means 937 books to 
be bound at the close of each year, in addition to the binding of 
— 
numerous books originally bound in paper, and the annual binding- 
repair and rebinding of old and rare items purchased second hand. 
