79 
The most valuable of all the fern collections at the Garden 
and, from a scientific standpoint, the most important, is the 
general working herbarium, located on the top floor, where it 
occupies sixteen cases in the long east-and-west laboratory, east 
of the library. Since January, 1908, the fern herbarium 
of the Scientific Directors has been officially known as the 
“Underwood Fern Herbarium,” and recently a bronze tablet 
bearing this name has been put in place on one of the cases. 
Fic. 12. Bronze tablet recently installed in the Underwood Fern Herbarium. 
The herbarium contains a total of about 16,000 specimens. 
The greater part of these are North American species, of whic 
the Garden probably has the most comprehensive pane 
in any herbarium. The collection was built up under the direc- 
tion of the late Professor L. M. Underwood, after whom it is 
named, and it owes its present efficiency as a working herbarium 
almost entirely to his efforts. Its efficiency is due not only to 
the large amount of recently collected material which it contains 
but in a very considerable degree to the fragments of older col- 
lections, often scraps of type material, which were obtained 
