ADDRESS OF WELCOME 



W. GiLMAN Thompson 



President, Board of Managers, The New York Botanical Garden 



Ladies and Gentlemen: 



On behalf of the Board of Managers of The New York Botanical 

 Garden, I extend to you a most cordial welcome to the celebration 

 of the twentieth anniversary of the establishment of the Garden. 

 The attendance here of so many guests, representatives of dis- 

 tinguished scientific and educational organizations in many parts 

 of the country, is in itself a gratifying reward for the labor and 

 study expended in the development of the Garden, and will 

 doubtless bring the stimulus of great encouragement to the energies 

 of its Staff. In these troublous times, when so large a part of the 

 world seems bent upon its own mad destruction, it is wholesome 

 to turn to constructive processes, and to a peaceful science based 

 upon the phenomena of growth. 



As a matter of local interest, too, it is interesting that in the 

 midst of a great city characterized particularly by the hurry and 

 bustle of strife (not to say by noise!) there should be found a 

 garden of beauty and peace, where one may commune with a 

 lotus from the Ganges, an orchid from the scenes of the Amazon, 

 or a pine from a far-off Himalayan mountainside. During the 

 past score of years, nothing of greater importance has occurred 

 in the phenomenal expansion of the City than the rescue and 

 redemption of the Garden land, so that, including a recent acquisi- 

 tion, there are now nearly 400 acres constituting a permanent 

 garden and lying within what has become a prominent residential 

 center of Greater New York. 



If our eminent Director could have been called as consulting 

 botanist in paleozoic days, I doubt whether he could have sug- 

 gested a more ideal site for a botanical garden than that which 

 nature kindly offered to the Board of Managers twenty years ago, 



