Annual Meeting - .] 
446 
[May 4, 
toward it and are pleased to announce that without direct solicita- 
tion we have received in cash or pledges, from twenty-eight dif- 
ferent persons, the sum of $4250 ; besides which we have pro- 
mises, more or less definite, amounting to between ten and fifteen 
thousand dollars, due to personal solicitation. 
Our appeal to the public, both through our pamphlets and by 
numerous more or less public addresses which members of our 
board and others have made to different bodies, has been re- 
ceived with all the praise and encouragement and even the 
enthusiasm one could wish from hosts of friends, very many of 
whom have given us tangible pledges of their interest ; but we 
have not yet succeeded in securing many of the larger subscrip- 
tions we had hoped to gain. This we believe has been in the 
main owing to the difficulty of reaching by personal call those to 
whom we naturally look for the larger gifts. Very much has 
been done in this direction by visits made by two, three, or more 
of the Directors, sometimes by the whole body together ; and no 
one who has not tried it would believe what an extraordinary 
amount of unavailing work will result from the absence or 
engagement of the parties called upon, which to men themselves 
busy in arduous professions, as was certainly the case with most 
of those whom you have chosen as Directors, has not been con- 
ducive to concerted action. 
We had hoped to make an aggressive campaign immediately on 
the publication of our Appeal, but its delay from unavoidable 
causes to the period when the annual exodus to the country 
begins rendered that impracticable. Then one of our few mem- 
bers has felt compelled to resign, and another and the most active 
was removed from us by death, while at the very beginning of 
the year we also lost the Secretary of the Society on whose youth- 
ful ardor and energy and especially on whose lively interest in 
the Gardens we had counted for the greatest aid. We have 
been much hampered also from having no means whereon to 
draw for personal or other service, not even for postage except 
a small sum generously placed last year at our disposal by the 
Woman’s Education Association, an association which has so 
often and with such a fine spirit aided the educational projects in 
which our Society has at different times been interested. We 
have indeed worked for almost the entire year under the incubus 
of a debt contracted for printing our Appeal, but now, we are 
