98 



Garden and Forest. 



[February 26, 1890. 



To learn enough to thus widen one's interest in Nature's 

 products is not a very difficult task. Indeed, there is no 

 other science in which a beginning is so easily made or 

 <ji\-es so large a return in pleasure. Materials for study 

 are everywhere at hand ; no traveling is needed, no great 

 exertion and no outlay of money. The needful tools are 

 as easily procured. A single volume like Gray's " New 

 Manual and Handbook " will give all requisite preliminary 

 instruction, full descriptions of all plants within a very 

 wide area, a glossary of terms to help out the weakest, 

 memory, and, as our correspondent says, a dictionary 

 of common names. With a knife, a long pin and a com- 

 mon magnifying glass the student has all he wants ; and 

 plants, even when withered and dissected, make a litter to 

 which no mother would object as she might to the mate- 

 rials of the boy who has a passion for flying and creeping 

 things. A few weeks of work, with living plants to illus- 

 trate the printed text, will seem more like play than work, 

 and will enable any young person to identify all the plants 

 in the neighborhood of his home. Any one who knows 

 what is meant by such a study of botany as suffices for 

 this purpose, and what is its immediate return in the 

 increase of enjoyment and the development of the observ- 

 ing faculties, may well be astounded that any prejudice 

 against it should ever be harbored. Of all the sciences this 

 is the one whose study should meet with every encourage- 

 ment as a happy and useful employment for our young 

 folks' summer hours. 



In the last annual report of the President of Harvard 

 College, recently issued, Mr. Eliot calls attention to the 

 pressing need of a better endowment for the Gray herba- 

 rium than that establishment now enjoys. The income of 

 the herbarium last year was only about $3,300, two-thirds 

 of which was derived from the copyrights which Professor 

 Gray bequeathed to it. From this slender income, which, 

 so far as regards the value of the copyrights, is liable to 

 diminish rather than to increase as years go on, the salary 

 of the Curator must be paid, the collection must be kept in 

 order and extended, and the library kept abreast of the times. 



The Gray herbarium is the national herbarium of America 

 in everything but name. No other collection of dried 

 plants in the new world equals it in size and in importance; 

 and its value for reference will continue, although it is pos- 

 sible that larger collections may in time be formed in better 

 endowed establishments. No other herbarium, however, 

 whatever its financial strength may be, can ever possess so 

 many of the type specimens of the American flora, or can sup- 

 plant the Cambridge collection as the final place of refer- 

 ence for determining the identity of the plants described by 

 Professor Gray and his associates. No critical student of 

 American plants can take a step in his investigations with- 

 out referring to the Gray collections, and their value is so 

 great and so generally acknowledged that Mr. Eliot's ap- 

 peal for a better herbarium endowment cannot long remain 

 without a favorable response. 



There is a pressing need in the herbarium of well trained 

 and capable assistants, that the Curator may be relieved of 

 the daily drudgery of caring for the collections, and be 

 left to carry forward the unfinished ' ' Flora of North Amer- 

 ica," on which Asa Gray worked for nearly half a century 

 and left only half completed. It can be finished at Cam- 

 bridge only and by an author thoroughly trained in sys- 

 tematic botany. This book is now more needed than any 

 other work of descriptive botany, and no mere financial 

 difficulty should be allowed to stand in the way of its 

 completion. 



Mr. Eliot asks for the sum of $40,000 with which to 

 endow the Gray herbarium. It appears to us that the sum 

 is much too small, in view of the importance and reputa- 

 tion of the collection, and the extent and character of the 

 botanical work the public has learnt to expect from Cam- 

 bridge. What the Gray herbarium really needs is a per- 

 manent endowment which will produce an income of not 

 less than twelve or fifteen thousand dollars ; and its greatest 



usefulness and efficiency cannot be secured with a smaller 

 sum. Harvard College has for years been supreme in 

 America in systematic botany, and she cannot now allow 

 her position as a leader in this department of knowledge 

 to be jeopardized through inability or unwillingness to 

 properly support her great herbarium, or to pay the price 

 of leadership. 



A few weeks ago we spoke with approval of certain 

 bills relating to our public forests which are now under 

 consideration by Congress. It should not be forgotten, 

 however, that the people who wish to convert the timber 

 on the national domain to their own private use are quite 

 as energetic as those who wish to protect it. There are 

 some nominal safeguards in the forms of law already which 

 are supposed to have been enacted to prevent the spoliation 

 of the public forests, but owing to essential defects in the 

 laws or their administration they have proved ineffective 

 hitherto, as is well known. Even these laws, however, 

 are looked upon as too much of an obstacle in the way of 

 free access to the public forests, and a bill of Senator 

 Teller's now before the Public Lands Committee seems to 

 have been devised to enable everybody who feels so 

 inclined to help himself and his friends to all the timber 

 they can use or sell. 



The bill is entitled "A bill authorizing the citizens of 

 certain states and territories to fell and remove timber on 

 the public domain for mining and domestic purposes," and 

 it seems well contrived to accelerate forest destruction. 

 The little formalities needed under this scheme to clothe 

 any one with power to take timber from the public forests 

 are to be entrusted to the registers and receivers of the 

 Land Office, who already have more duties than they can 

 properly perform, and altogether the timber-cutters would 

 have a merry time under the provisions of the proposed 

 law. 



An Alley in the Tuilleries Garden, Paris. 



THE garden of the Tuilleries was laid out, by Le Notre, in 

 1665. Since the Revolution its design has been some- 

 what modified, but most portions still show the arrangements 

 of the great master of formal gardening design. Upon one 

 side fronted the palace, which was destroyed in 1871, the 

 ground it covered being now laid out witli paths, lawns and 

 flower-beds, as described in the article on " French Par- 

 terres," published in our issue for January 29th. This 

 change has, however, only increased the beauty of the 

 Tuilleries gardens, for, as we stand in their central alleys, the 

 eye, instead of being stopped by the fagade of the palace, 

 looks over the newly planted ground into the vast court-yard 

 formed by the Louvre, where rises the Arc du Carrousel, and 

 beyond it a number of small, park-like enclosures with fine 

 trees. All this large and beautifully arranged place and the 

 great buildings about it were formerly concealed by the facade 

 of the Tuilleries, and, therefore, admirable as this was in 

 itself, its loss is more than made good. Again, standing back 

 within the quadrangle, we now have, enframed in its wings, a 

 majestic perspective unrivaled in any modern city — first, the 

 Arc du Carrousel, then the brilliant new garden, then the mas- 

 sive plantations of Le Notre, and beyond them the obelisk of 

 the Place de la Concorde, and past this the long, rising slope 

 of the Champs Elys£es, with the Arc de Triomphe standing 

 majestically against the far distant sky. The long, gentle rise 

 in the ground beyond the Place de la Concorde adds vastly, 

 of course, to the effect of the picture, but only a nation with a 

 true instinct for art in its most monumental phases could 

 have utilized it to such good effect and brought it into one great 

 composition with the Tuilleries gardens, a century and a half 

 after these were formed. 



The palace faced on one of the narrower sides of the gar- 

 den as it lay by the bank of the Seine. Along this river-side 

 and the remaining two sides as well, Le Notre arranged 

 elevated terraces, planted with avenues of trees. At the 

 western side, opposite the palace, two great curving stairways 

 of marble lead to the terrace and the Place de la Concorde be- 

 yond ; and smaller stairways rise on the river-side, and, oppo- 

 site this, to the Rue de Rivoli. In our picture we see the 

 houses that form the Rue de Rivoli, and, in the distance, the 

 tall pavilion which finishes the north side of the Louvre and 



