11 
THE DESERT BOTANICAL LABORATORY OF THE 
CARNEGIE INSTITUTION. 
The Board of Trustees of the Carnegie Institution has made 
an appropriation of $8,000 for the establishment and mainten- 
ance of a desert botanical laboratory for the fiscal year 1902~ 
1903, and at the request of the Executive Committee of the In- 
stitution Dr. D. T. MacDougal, Director of the Laboratories, 
has been permitted to serve with Mr. Frederick V. Coville, Chief 
of the Division of Botany, of the Bureau of Plant Industry of 
the U. S. Department of Agriculture, as an advisory board in 
relation to this undertaking. 
The Desert laboratory has been established for the purpose 
of making a thorough investigation of the physiological and 
morphological features of plants under the unusual conditions to 
be found in desert regions, with particular reference to the rela- 
tions of the characteristic vegetation to water, light, temperature 
and other special factors. 
A resident investigator to be placed in immediate charge of 
the laboratory will begin a series of researches upon certain 
more important problems outlined by the Board and facilities 
will be provided by the aid of which a few other investigators 
from any part of the world may carry on work upon any prob- 
lem connected with desert plants. 
orth America contains more than a million square miles of 
territory known to the geologist, geographer and botanist as 
desert. The conditions offered vegetation in these districts show 
such wide departures from those of humid temperate, and tropi- 
cal regions, the living flora is accessible to so few workers, and 
the entailed investigations are necessarily so wide in scope, so 
expensive and difficult in execution that the advance of syste- 
matic knowledge of the fundamental processes of desert plants 
has been comparatively slow, and this lack of information has 
made many current generalizations concerning the activity of 
plants very unsafe. The establishment of this laboratory promises 
results concerning the fundamental processes of plant protoplasm 
