Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/337

Rh force of men varying from eight to fifteen with the requirements of the season.

The institute is an oblong brick structure, one hundred and seventy feet in length by sixty-five in width, standing in the southeastern corner of the grounds. This building is two-storied in part, the second story being devoted to the use of the director and his family. The first floor accommodates the director's offices, private laboratory, and experimental rooms, dark rooms, laboratories for physiology and morphology, the lecture room, and a museum containing the Gaertner collection.

The laboratories are supplied with a set of physiological apparatus embracing the standard forms, a large number of which were originally designed to facilitate researches undertaken here in the last twenty years. The museum contains the von Mohl collection of microscopes, which represents the development of this instrument from the time of Joseph Gaertner to that of Hofmeister, more than one hundred years. The Gaertner museum contains the carpological collections of Joseph Gaertner, on which his work De Fructibus, etc., was based, in the labeled bottles as prepared by him. For greater safety these bottles were inclosed in larger bottles and labeled by von Mohl, and the thoughtful observer looks forward to the time when a third casing of glass will be added to protect the prized handwriting of von Mohl. In this museum are also to be found the dried specimens of hybrids and seeds, drawings, manuscripts, and published works of Karl Friedrich Gaertner, and a large number of preparations for the microscope made by von Mohl and Hofmeister. The commodious lecture room is provided with all necessary appliances for successful demonstrations—charts, prepared specimens, wood and paper models, etc.

The investigator who comes here to undertake the solution of some problem in botany meets a body of congenial workers whose earnest enthusiasm is quickly contagious. He is furnished with ample space in well-lighted rooms and any necessary apparatus. If it is necessary to construct temporary apparatus to carry forward his experiments, a stock of material is at hand and he may have the intelligent assistance of the "Hausmeister," who has had a score of years of experience in such work in this institute. If the problem requires the application of delicate or complex machinery, he may call to his assistance Herr Eugen Albrecht "Universitäts-mechaniker"—whose skill in designing effective apparatus for use in the physiology of plants and animals is known round the world. The library of the institute and that of the director contain a large number of works of the more prominent botanical authors, and a blank form properly filled will bring to his desk almost anything bearing upon his work from the