CHAPTER III 
THE JODRELL LABORATORY AND NORTH GALLERY 
Nowadays the botanic garden is made to serve many purposes. 
Primarily, its business is to promote the knowledge of plants, their 
^ structure, functions, uses, and geographical distribution. 
In earlier times it was the morphology of the plant — 
y ‘ its form and structure — that obtained the botanist’s chief 
attention. That, perhaps, was inevitable whilst the classification 
of the vegetable kingdom was still being laboriously evolved, but, 
latterly, physiology — or the study of the processes going on within 
the plant itself — has engaged some of the most alert minds devoted 
to the investigation of plant-fife. 
It was to furnish facilities for this branch of study that the 
Laboratory was built. Kew owes its acquisition to the generosity 
of one man, Mr. T. J. Phillips Jodrell, who built and equipped 
it at his own expense in 1876. It is fitted with apparatus for the 
chemical analysis of vegetable organisms, for their microscopical study, 
anatomical research, photography, etc. The Laboratory stands in the 
private ground at the north end of the Herb Garden. It is a red- 
brick, one-storeyed building, and is not open to the general public. 
Since 1876, large numbers of botanists have carried out investiga- 
tions in the Jodrell Laboratory, and many of their researches 
have been of great scientific interest and importance. The work 
has naturally ranged over various branches of botany, as will be 
shown by the following references to a few of the subjects 
dealt with. 
A series of investigations (begun in 1893) of the structure of fossil 
plants, chiefly from the Coal Measures, has been carried out by Dr. 
D. H. Scott — at first in conjunction with the late Professor W. C. 
Williamson. Among the fossils studied, the most interesting were 
a series of plants with fern-like foliage, possessing an anatomical 
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