189 
was reserved as an open space, thus making possible the very site 
of the Garden. 
Our President, Mr. Blum, has already paid tribute to Professor 
Franklin W. Hooper, who was the first to suggest the idea of a 
botanic garden on this site. His service to Brooklyn in building 
up the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, of which the Gar- 
den is a Department, can never be overestimated. 
In the Boys and Girls Clubroom, where I hope you can all go 
before leaving this evening, is a portrait of one who was called in 
his lifetime Brooklyn’s most useful citizen. Underneath this por- 
trait we have placed the following quotation as epitomizing his 
ideals and his accomplishments: “To build the city 1s the great 
accomplishment, not to possess it.” What a wonderful city this 
would be—what a wonderful world this would be—if this were 
the ideal of every citizen! When we speak in this way of a former 
3rooklynite, it is never necessary to state that the man was Alfred 
T. White. He has been justly called “ the father of the Brooklyn 
Botanic Garden.” He not only laid the cornerstone of this build- 
ing, but himself became the cornerstone of the institution whose 
work 
— 
_— 
as centered here during the past twenty-five years. 
To t 
— 
iose, however, who know and understand, it is not possible 
to think or speak of what Mr. White meant to this institution 
without thinking and speaking of two others, near and dear to him, 
anonymous by their own wish, who, together with him and through 
him, not only made possible the establishment of this Botanic Gar- 
den in 1910 but, more than any other one factor, have made pos- 
sible the accomplishment of the Garden’s services to this city and 
its world-wide services to science and education. This, for all 
time, will be the outstanding fact in the history of this Botanic 
Garden, just as John Harvard and Eli Yale are the outstanding 
facts in the history of the universities that bear their names. 
Last week the British Empire celebrated the twenty-fifth anni- 
versary of the reign of King George V. In his address to the 
King last Thursday noon, the Lord Chancellor emphasized the 
fact that the British Empire is rooted in tradition and long history. 
The very Hall of Westminster, he recalled, epitomized British his- 
— 
es 
tory, with its beams of mediaeval oak, and its six centuries of un- 
broken history. 
