(99) 
The report of the Director of the Laboratories hereto 
appended presents a record of the work of students and an 
outline of investigations conducted. 
Public Instruction 
Thirty-four public lectures were delivered on Saturday 
afternoons during the season, all but nine of them delivered 
by members of the staff. Titles of these lectures are 
recorded in the appended report of the Assistant Director, 
which also contains records of publications issued during 
the year, of meetings held, and of instruction given by 
employees detailed as docents. 
Labeling of the collections has been continued, and it is 
by means of the labels accompanying plants and specimens 
that the greatest amount of information is furnished to 
visitors. Informational labels aggregating 5,498 have been 
painted for plants in the grounds and greenhouses, the 
total number of such labels now in place being over 20,000. 
These labels give an English name and the botanical 
name of the plant, the country where it is native, and the 
family to which it belongs. If funds were available for 
the purpose, this system of information might be much 
elaborated by putting more on the labels than we are now 
able to do; this would necessarily increase their size and 
make them more conspicuous. There are some objections 
to increasing their prominence in the landscape, however. 
Exploration 
Botanical work in Porto Rico was continued in the early 
part of the year through an expedition by the Director-in- 
Chief and Mrs. Britton, accompanied by Mr. John F. 
Cowell, Director of the Buffalo Botanical Garden, and by 
Mr. Stewardson Brown, Curator of Botany at the Phila- 
delphia Academy of Sciences, and also by Professor Wille, 
Director of the Botanical Garden of Christiania, Norway, 
accompanied by Mrs. Wille.* Extensive and important 
* See Jour. N. Y. Bot. Gard. 16: 103-112; 132-146. 
