THE AMERICAN BOTANIST. 
95 
of our readers would be willing to make a try at it. The 
task of selecting worthy objects upon which to bestow money 
is daily becoming more difficult for the business of giving a 
bunch of novels to every community that has not already more 
than is good for it has nearly come to an end for want of more 
communities to operate on. Some enterprising billionaire may 
yet go Carnagie one better by giving a library to every indi- 
vidual who can read and there might be collections of picture- 
books for those who cannot, but if one has money to give 
away to deserving objects, why would it not be an excellent 
thing to devote some of it to the advancement of botany ? The 
prosperity of our entire nation is based upon agriculture, and 
intelligent agriculture is based upon the principles of botany. 
And yet how many schools there are in which good teachers 
are hampered in the presentation of the subject by inadequate 
equipments. Even with the best of equipment, it is difficult 
to give the pupil a correct idea of the vegetation of other re- 
gions. What advances could not be made by a school with 
sufficient endowment to enable pupils to visit another region 
for a week or two each year — pupils of temperate regions 
enabled to spend ten days of winter in the tropics ; pupils in the 
tropics allowed to spend a week or more of early summer in 
the North ; pupils in the arid regions sent to rainy districts and 
vice versa. It would not need the income from the price of a 
Carnagie library to provide yearly trips of this kind for all 
time. And what a monument that would be to the man who 
established it! Should any of our millionaire readers be in- 
clined to try the scheme, the editor of this magazine knows of 
a school that would cheerfully offer itself to be experimented 
upon. 
* * * 
One rule adopted by the Vienna Congress that we are not 
fully willing to subscribe to, is the rule that after a certain 
date all new species described shall be described in Latin. At 
