18 



were willing to regard it as satisfactory, it seems to provide for 

 every important contingency that it was possible to foresee, and 

 it promises a safety, permanence and stability that are too often 

 wanting in similar organizations. 



To enter upon a discussion of the personal credit due in the 

 membership, the board of managers and of scientific directors, and 

 in the Garden staff, would be an agreeable pleasure, but I must 

 confine myself to the very earnestly made remark that the great 

 success of the Garden has been due to the love of the institution 

 and its work which has animated all concerned in it. It is this 

 which has lent faithfulness, earnestness and energy and has incited 

 to many acts of great sacrifice. If it could ever be said of any 

 similar institution, we are able to say of this that it is a monu- 

 ment of loving service, in which work has been accepted in con- 

 siderable part as its own reward. This is wholly true of Mrs. 

 Britton's work in building up one of the most important depart- 

 ments of bryology in existence. 



I dare not enter upon a detailed history of the Garden's devel- 

 opment, and it has been so often and so recently recorded that I 

 do not deem it necessary. An excellent account of its organi- 

 zation and of Columbia's relation to it, by Professor Underwood, 

 can be found in the Columbia Quarterly 4: 278. 1903. Our 

 charter was secured in 1 89 1 and was amended in 1894. It was 

 agreed upon that 250 acres of park lands should be set apart for 

 our use and $500,000 appropriated for the museum building and 

 conservatories, as soon as an endowment fund of 5250,000 was 

 obtained. This fund was completed in 1895, Columbia Univer- 

 sity making the first subscription of $25,000. With the election 

 of Dr. N. L. Britton as Director-in-Chief, and his selection of a 

 working staff, the preparations were complete and work began in 

 1896, the event which we are to-day celebrating. This was the 

 year in which the first part of Britton and Brown's Illustrated 

 Flora was published. Ground was broken for the Museum 

 Building in December, 1897, and for the conservatories in 1898. 

 The Museum was opened in 1899. In 1898 the bulk of the her- 

 barium of Columbia College, numbering nearly half a million 

 specimens, and of its botanical library, including more than 5,000 



