9 
The expense of maintaining the garden has been tempor- 
arily increased by the high prices of almost all the vegetable 
products used as food, which have been current through the 
year — the cost of some of the larger items of subsistance 
having been nearly double that of the year before — and also 
by the large consumption of fuel required by the long and 
severe winter just passed. 
During the year, the iron railing and wall which had 
been partly erected along the Thirty -fifth street line of the 
garden, has been completed for a distance of seven hundred 
and fourteen feet, and now surrounds the garden, except on 
the Thirty-seventh street boundary. 
A carpenter shop and storage shed, measuring fifty by 
eighteen feet, and a permanent slaughter house, twenty by 
fourteen feet, with a stable adjoining for the accommodation 
of horses kept for food, have been built on the rear line of 
the garden, near the old barn, and the temporary buildings 
formerly used for those purposes at the southern end of the 
grounds, have been removed. 
The whole southern end of the grounds has been graded, 
asphalt walks have been laid, with the necessary drainage, 
trees have been planted along the borders ; and that part of 
the garden which remained unfinished has been put in 
permanent condition. 
A considerable amount of repairing has been done to the 
heating apparatus in the carnivora and monkey houses, and 
the exterior of those buildings, with the elephant house, the 
northern gate houses, and some of the smaller buildings, 
have been thoroughly renovated and repaired. 
