KEW GARDENS. 
165 
ON KEW GARDENS AND SOME OF THE BOTANICAL 
STATISTICS OF THE BRITISH POSSESSIONS.* 
BY J. G. BAKER, F.R.S., F.L.S. 
When our friends come to visit us at Kew it is usually in 
May, June, or July, when the days are long and the Garden is 
in its full perfection. But as this is the busiest time of the 
year I am afraid that the questions they ask are liable to get 
answered very briefly and incompletely, and if it be a matter 
where figures are involved it is both difficult to remember 
them on the spur of the moment, and difficult for the memory, 
even when they are told correctly, not to mix them up together. 
I propose, therefore, to occupy my allotted hour this evening 
in attempting, in the comparative leisure of mid-winter, to 
answer more fully and precisely than is possible in conver¬ 
sation a few of the principal questions about Kew which are 
asked most frequently by those who wish to form a full and 
intelligent idea of the plan and purposes of the establishment. 
The General Plan of the Kew Establishment. 
The aim of a National Botanic Garden is to illustrate as 
fully as possible the plants and their products, in the first 
place of the country to which it belongs, and subserviently to 
this the plants of other parts of the world. First of all we 
must possess the means of distinguishing from one another 
and identifying the separate individual kinds of plant, and 
based upon this follows the investigation of the different 
points of interest connected with their life-liistory and various 
economic uses, as food or clothing, or in medicine and the arts. 
It is quite safe to say that none but a very limited number of 
specialists have any idea of the enormous number of different 
kinds of plants there are in the world. A very moderate 
estimate, founded on the figures as they stand in Benthanr 
and Hooker’s “ Genera Plantarum” for the flowering plants 
alone, leaving out of account the ferns, and all the lower 
orders of Oryptogamia, is 200 natural orders, 10,000 genera, 
and 100,000 species. Although the possessions of Britain 
occupy only about one-sixtli part of the world, yet they lie so 
far apart from one another, and under so many different 
conditions of latitude and longitude and climate, that they 
* A Lecture delivered at the Friends’ Meeting-house at West¬ 
minster, January 2Gth, 1886, and at the Birmingham Natural History 
and Microscopical Society, May 29th, 1888. 
