REPORT OF SECRETARY AND LIBRARIAN. 323 



prepared for it, and uot to be obliged to remove valuable books at 

 a moment's notice, to the great danger of their injury. Moreover 

 the question to what place they shall be removed, even for a few 

 hours, is one uot easily auswered. 



Among the more important additions to the Library during the 

 year I would mention first, a set of Nature, in forty-seven volumes, 

 the gift of Waldo O. Ross, a former Chairman of the Library 

 Committee, whose zeal for the improvement of the Library has 

 suffered no diminution in the seventeen years since his retirement, 

 but there is no room in our bookcases for his valuable donation. 

 Of those monumental works, the Index Kewensis and the Silva of 

 North America, the former has been completed, and the latter has 

 made good progress, volumes seven and eight having been placed 

 on the shelves this year. Kuiphof's Botanica in Originali, in four 

 folio volumes, is interesting as being one of the first, if not 

 actually the first, work of considerable extent in which the process 

 of nature-printing was employed to illustrate plants. It was sup- 

 posed that a copy in the library at Kew Gardens was unique in being 

 colored, but the twelve hundred plates in ours are all colored, and 

 it seems to be in every way as good a copy as that at Kew. That 

 admirable work, Kerner and Oliver's Natural History of Plants 

 has been completed. A set of the London Journal of Botany, 

 which has long been a desideratum, as one member of a series 

 forming substantially one work, all the others of w^hich we have 

 long possessed, has at last been secured, and a set, as far as pub- 

 lished, of the later Annals of Botany has been purchased. A set of 

 Ledebour's Flora Rossica, in five folio volumes, with five hundred 

 •colored plates, remarkable for the minuteness of the engraving, is 

 among our most important acquisition in its line, and a set, in six 

 octavo volumes, of William Gilpin's works on Landscape Garden- 

 ing and Forest Scenery is a valuable addition to our collection of 

 books on that subject. A set in sixteen volumes of The Gardener, 

 a periodical edited by William and David Thomson, from 1867 to 

 1882, though less costly than the books above mentioned, finds an 

 appropriate place in our library. Les Orchidees Exotiques et leur 

 Culture en Europe, by Lucien Linden, and Le Livre des Orchidc'es, 

 by the Comte de Kerchove de Denterghem, are two solid and 

 valuable works on that family.of plants. The great interest which 

 has been awakened during the past year in Edible and Poisonous 

 Fungi has led to the purchase of such works on that subject as 



