PART III 
KEW IN ITS SCIENTIFIC ASPECT 
CHAPTER I 
THE HERBARIUM AND LIBRARY 
Kew is the headquarters of botanical science in the British Empire 
— one might, without extravagance, say in the whole world. That is 
its highest purpose. What Greenwich is to astronomy, 
o^a^Sctence 5 National Gallery to painting, the British Museum 
to archaeology, such is Kew to botany. The facilities 
it affords for the study of this branch of natural history — in many 
respects the most important branch — are not equalled elsewhere. 
Its magnificent Library of botanical works (for practical purposes 
complete) ; its Herbarium, unrivalled in extent and unique in the 
number of type specimens it contains ; its collections of living plants 
— all render it indispensable for the carrying out of any great work 
in botany. It is, in consequence, visited every year by a large 
number of foreign as well as native scientific men engaged on botani- 
cal monographs, in the preparation of new “ floras,” or in botanical 
research of any kind. The Herbarium is, of course, concerned mainly 
with systematic and geographical botany — the identity of plants, 
their relative position in the vegetable kingdom, and their distribu- 
tion over the globe. For the physiologist and anatomist there is the 
Jodrell Laboratory ; and for the study of the practical uses of plants 
— or economic botany — there are the museums. 
A herbarium, or hortus siccus as it was usually termed in earlier 
days, is indispensable to the proper working of a botanic garden. 
It is only by means of such an institution — and its necessary 
Hortus a qj unc t ; a botanical library — that the identity of plants 
^ tccus * whose names are unknown or lost can be ascertained. At 
Kew, where the species actually in cultivation are numbered by 
tens of thousands, and where new additions are being made every 
day, the Herbarium and Library are in almost hourly requisition. 
That is their domestic function. 
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