60 
In a letter to W. H. Harvey, in 1857, Hooker writes “ We have 
just drawn up the Garden Report and pitched in very strong about 
the uses of the Herbarium as a scientific adjunct to the Gardens.” 
Perhaps it may not be amiss to give here a brief statement, for 
layman consumption, of what the botanist conceives the uses of a 
herbarium to be. 
Dr. David Fairchild, of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, 
in his recent book, Haploring for plants (MacMillan, 1930), writes 
as follows: 
“To those who hurry through life the hundreds of cases in the 
Kew Herbarium contain only so much dried plant material; 
mummies having little relation to the actual plants, fragments of 
flowers and leaves, brown with age and often falling to pieces. 
Such as these do not realize, I think, that although you can de- 
scribe a plant species in words, if you are clever enough, it is 
vastly more difficult to tell from the verbal description whether 
some plant which you have in your hand is that plant or not, than 
it is to turn to a dried specimen of it in a herbarium and compare 
its form with the one you have.” 
As Hooker stated, a well-kept botanic garden without some sort 
of herbarium is well-nigh an impossibility. Besides the constant 
utilization of our herbarium for comparison and naming of ma- 
terial which is sent us for identification, and the continuous refer- 
ence made to it in the identification‘and selection of material for 
our plantations and conservatories, it is also an important adjunct 
in classroom instruction, including courses given on medicinal and 
other economic plants. Numerous problems are brought to us 
during the year the only solution to which lies in the herbarium 
collections. 
The herbarium also serves as the basis of work on our local 
flora, for it includes the actual plants once growing in localities 
now completely covered by the urban expansion of New York City. 
We are specially interested in Long Island. In order to under- 
stand the place of our own flora we must have comparative material 
of the same and related species from other regions. 
In general, for researches relative to plant classification it is 
necessary to depend on herbaria. Their collections are more ex- 
tensive and diversified than the necessarily limited collections of 
