
127 
Prof. H. J. Banker, who called at the Garden on July 10 and 
August 3, has resigned the professorship of biology in DePauw 
University, which he has held since 1904, and has accepted a posi- 
tion with the Eugenics Record Office of the Carnegie Institution 
of Washington, at Cold Spring Harbor, L. I. 

Prof. Adolf J. A. Fredholm, M.D., D.Agr., formerly agrono- 
mist of the experiment station, Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, and 
now professor of agronomy in the university of Porto Rico, at 
Mayaguez, visited the Garden on August 20. 
Psychology in Park Management: The malicious (?) girdling 
of white birches in the Garden was followed by our placing on 
the injured trees a notice calling attention to the injury, and 
stating briefly the botanical reasons why it would prove fatal to 
the life of the trees. The matter was made the subject of Garden 
Leaflet Ser. II, No. 7, Vandalism turned to account, which was 
reprinted in full in Home Progress 3:555-556, Ag 1914. This 
leaflet has occasioned much comment, some of it favorable, and 
some questioning the advisability of the label on the girdled birch, 
holding that the presence of the label on the tree first injured may 
have been and quite probably was, the direct stimulus to the 
girdling of the second tree. One correspondent has written as 
follows: 
“T would like to make a suggestion, and that is that it is quite 
likely that the destruction of the trees is not intentional and 
malicious in the sense of the free-will theory but that it is done 
in somewhat the same spirit as one burns a house or jumps in 
front of a passing railroad train. I think the hypothesis is equally 
probable that the act is done under a momentary impulse which is 
irresistible but which has back of it nothing which can properly be 
called malice. By this hypothesis the worst possible thing to do 
is to offer any suggestion of the possibility of such evil. I beg, 
therefore, to offer the suggestion, which I am quite sure many 
psychiatrists would agree with:—Just the prominence you have 
made of the injured tree and its consequences is of the sort which 
will lead to a suggestion on the part of certain hysterical or feebly 
inhibited persons, leading them to do that which without the sign 
and the striking evidence would have hardly occurred to them; at 

