Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 57.djvu/184

174 great historic value in connection with the work of Dr. John Torrey and the earlier botanical development of America is included. Accessions are being made to the herbarium at the rate of fifty to a hundred thousand specimens annually.

The laboratories consist of a series of rooms facing northward and westward, with special facilities for taxonomic, embryological and morphological investigations. Physiological and photographic darkrooms, the experiment room for living plants and chemical laboratories offer especially ample opportunities for the record and development of practically all phases of plant physiology. The laboratories, library and herbarium are open to the graduate students from Columbia



University, in addition to those from other institutions of learning who may register directly at the Garden. The latter, in return, have the privileges of students at Columbia University.

A weekly convention of all of the workers in botany in New York City is held in the museum, at which the results of recent researches are given or an address is made by an invited speaker from out of the city.

The area of the Garden presents a very irregular topography, comprising, as it does, a half mile of the valley of the Bronx River, low marshes and swamps, artificial lakes, open glades, with heavy peaty soil, upland plains with gravelly sandy soil, granite ridges, and about seventy acres of natural forest. About forty acres of this forest consist of a dense grove of hemlocks, which has never been seriously