1886. ] BOTANICAL GAZETTE. 15] 
The Gray Herbarium of Harvard University. 
No one need be told that this is the largest and most valuable 
collection on this continent. For its beginnings we must look to 
the collections begun by Dr. Asa Gray while a student at Fairfield 
Medical College in the year 1828. When Dr. Gray was called to 
a professorship in Harvard College he found no collections of 
dried plants. Such as had been made by previous incumbents 
had been considered as personal property. The collection which 
Dr. Gray had got together up to this time amounted to between 
four and five thousand species, including many European and 
arctic American specimens procured from foreign correspondents. 
his collection increased, more and more rapidly as its extent 
and scientific value increased, until it became too large to be cared 
or by its owner and too valuable to be longer at the mercy of a 
frame house. Consequently it was offered as a gift to the Uni- 
versity on condition that a fire-proof building be erected to con- 
tain it. In this building, the gift of Nathaniel Thayer, it was 
placed in the year 1864. The herbarium building proper is sit- 
uated on a terrace in the midst of the Botanic Garden, overlooking 
a large part of it, and is flanked by the library on one side and 
the laboratory on the other, with both of which it is directly con- 
nected as these are respectively with Dr. Gray’s dwelling and the 
greenhouses. 
The herbarium occupies the main room, about thirty-five by 
twenty-five feet, with walls twenty-five feet high. The room is 
lighted by a very large double window (the full height of the 
walls) looking to the north-west, and by a sky-light in the center. 
‘he walls to the height of sixteen feet are practically covered with 
cases, a baleony giving access to the upper tiers. sides these 
there are five floor eases, the three largest of which contain the 
Composite. The total capacity of the cases now in place is some- 
where near 350,000 sheets, allowing for an average number of 
genus-covers. It is impossible to estimate with any accuracy 
the present extent of the collection. It is probably equal to two- 
thirds or three-fourths of the total capacity. This rough guess 
does not include the Sullivant herbarium of mosses nor any of 
the other collections of lower eryptogams in this building.* The 
records kept for the last sixteen years show that the average annual 
additions to the herbarium are 6306 sheets. : 
The wall cases are of the usual form and are closed with ordi- 
woreeuligep Ugoa Sisk Si 
*The large Cryptogamic herbarium of Dr. Farlow is in the Agassiz Museum building. 
