8 
provisions of its charter, as well as by their sense of a 
proper conduct of the trust confided to them and their * 
constant object has been to place the Garden— purely as a 
Zoological Garden — in the front rank of such ' institu- 
tions. 
In this they confidently feel that they have succeeded in 
greater measure than is perhaps commonly recognized by 
the people of our city, as few among the great gardens of 
the world can justly be considered as generally superior to 
our own. 
The public services rendered by such an institution are 
comprised in the very definition of education, in its broad, 
modern sense, and need demonstration in this day quite as 
little as do its other functions in the direction of recreation, 
but it may be considered doubtful if the general view per- 
ceives as yet, the full value in the great educational object 
lesson system of our time, of an institution which attracts 
at one moment, into the same path, two such differing ele- 
ments of human intelligence as the capacity for observa- 
tion and the love of enjoyment, which, differing though 
they do, must both be brought into harmony to i^each the 
best results, especially in the early years of individual de- 
velopment. 
The Board desires to express here its conviction that with 
the spread of the present awakening in the subject of in- 
struction of the general public, this view of the relation of 
the Zoological Garden to the society among which it is 
placed, will reach a wider acceptance, with the double result 
of greatly extending the Society's usefulness and at the 
same time, determining towards it such a measure of 
public or private liberality as will place it beyond the dan- 
gers which threaten its existence, if a period of such finan- 
cial depression as is shown by the present report, were to 
extend to a period longer than one year. 
That this is not a fancied, but a present danger, the figures 
of the accompanying statement of income and expenditures, 
will show at a glance and the attention of the public can 
not be too strongly directed towards them. 
