109 



and, of greater importance, was being modernized. When the 

 Doctor was at length prepared to make the situation known to 

 Columbia, it was not to submit plans for the organization of a 

 botanical department, but to present to it one already made, and 

 requiring only to be officially recognized and formally named. 

 The performance of these ceremonies, with suitable provision for 

 maintenance, guaranteed the position of New York as one of the 

 first botanical centers of the country, and later of the world, with Dr, 

 Brittonas Columbia's fourth professor in this department. Thus we 

 see that at every important stage in its development, the botanical 

 department of Columbia has owed its prosperity not to the institu- 

 tion as such, but to some earnest worker, ready to make the sacri- 

 fice of love. Hosack individually made the botanical garden that 

 afterward enriched the institution; Torrey accumulated the her- 

 barium that became the corner-stone of the later structure ; Brit- 

 ton silently — one may almost say surreptitiously — brought 

 about changes which have finally placed it in the vanguard of 

 the world's botanical forces. 



The intercourse and personal and professional associations de- 

 pendent upon the increasing number of persons in and about New 

 York who became interested in botanical work in Torrey's 

 time led most naturally and inevitably to a botanical society, at 

 first incidental and unorganized, later a formal organization. 



As is true of so many institutions which grow healthily and 

 attain to great and permanent success, the exact date of the 

 origin of our Club can hardly be fixed. Those of you who take 

 even the slightest general interest in this subject should not fail 

 to read * the inaugural address of Dr. George Thurber, delivered 

 at the Astor House in 1873, on the occasion of his first election 

 as our first president. He confesses his entire inability to fix on 

 the time when Torrey and his friends virtually established the 

 society. He says that for a long time after the election of the 

 first set of officers the members found it impossible to break from 

 the habit of informal, free-and-easy, conversational meetings 

 which had grown up and which, I must remark, have always been 

 found the most effective in the Club's work, whenever they have 

 recurred. 



* Bull. Torrey Club, 4 : 26-39. 1873. 



