JULY 21, 1899. | 
ately about the Queen’s cottage. Sir Wil- 
liam Hooker died in 1866 and was succeeded 
by his son, Sir Joseph D. Hooker, also an 
eminent botanist, who still has his room in 
the herbarium and at 81 is yet active and 
enthusiastic in botanical work. He re- 
signed his post as Director in 1885, and 
was succeeded by Dr. W. T. Thiselton- 
Dyer, who for some time previously had oc- 
cupied. the position of Assistant Director- 
It is needless to say to those who have 
watched the growth and widening influ- 
ence of Kew in the past few years that 
much of the present development and much 
of the system manifest in its management, 
and, above all, its widening influence, is 
due to Dr. Dyer’s versatility and ability as 
a Director. For ten years past he has been 
ably seconded in the management of the 
garden by Dr. Daniel Morris, whose colo- 
nial experience in Ceylon and Jamaica, and 
wide travel throughout the world, has en- 
abled him to direct wisely the colonial pol- 
icy of the garden. Many New Yorkers will 
recall his visit here in 1895, and the man- 
agers of our own garden owe much to his 
kindly advice and suggestions on their 
plans, rendered after an extended visit to 
Bronx Park. 
Kew Gardens are located on the Surrey 
side of the Thames, on the line of omni- 
buses leading from London to Richmond 
and Hampton Court. The seventh mile 
post from Hyde Park corner is just beyond 
the Unicorn Gate. Two railways, besides 
the Thames steamers and omnibuses,connect 
it with London, and its appreciation by the 
people is shown by the great numbers of 
visitors, ranging from a few thousand to a 
hundred thousand people in a day, the lat- 
ter crowd only on bank holidays or other 
special occasions. 
The development of Kew Gardens from 
the first has been a struggle with adverse 
conditions. In the first place, the park 
is a flat meadow land bordering on the 
SCIENCE. 67 
Thames, and all the slight inequalities of 
surface that now exist in the garden are arti- 
ficial, having been made from ancient gravel 
pits or purposely excavated from the soil. 
There is little variation in the soil itself, 
which is generally of poor quality, under- 
laid by alluvial deposits of sand and gravel, 
which permit the rapid loss of water by in- 
filtration. Nota rock occurs on the tract, 
and the rustic rock garden that is now one 
of the attractive features of the place was 
artificially constructed from the remains of 
an old stone building. 
In all the features that pertain to natural 
location and diversity of structure our own 
Bronx Park possesses vastly superior ad- 
vantages for a botanical garden by reason 
of its bogs, its meadows, its rocks, its 
wooded knolls, its meandering river, and 
withal a soil that will support its vegeta- 
tion with far less care than must be con- 
stantly devoted at Kew. In fact, Kew 
lacks all those natural bits of rusticity that 
are constantly surprising one in our own 
garden and which the management has 
wisely determined to protect and perpetu- 
ate. 
In the second place, the annual rainfall at 
Kew is less than at almost any other place 
in the British Isles—in fact, little above one- 
sixth of the maximum in the United King- 
dom. ‘This condition tends to drouth and 
necessitates a vast amount of artificial 
spraying; notwitbstanding all this, the 
drouth of the past two summers made the 
beautiful lawns look brown and bleak, as 
though it were November instead of July. 
Kew Gardens lie in an upward bend of 
the River Thames as it curves round from 
Twickenham Ferry to Mortlake, so that the 
outline is more or less irregular, though the 
eastern side is nearly straight, being bounded 
by the narrow road from Kew Bridge to 
Richmond. All along this road the gardens 
are shut in by the characteristic ugly brick 
wall, much like those that shut out the pub- 
