Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/222

216 passage to the garden of his personal herbarium. Twice, the Chapman herbarium had been sold—each time the best representatives in it being selected, and supplemented by fragments from his scrap books when these were essential for the representation of a species; but there remained at the time of his death a large amount of material which as he said consisted of the original fragmentary specimens representative of his earlier work on the southern flora, and, therefore, really the types of the species contained in it as he then understood them. For every student of the plants of this region, therefore, this collection is of the greatest value, as showing, so far as

it goes, what he really had in mind when using a particular name—and it was precisely that this record of his work might be permanently preserved, that he was desirous that his collection should find its home in the garden.

In themselves, living plants, books and herbarium specimens are but a burden to those charged with looking after and caring for them. He is a happy botanist who has no care except for the thing that his mind is turned to at any given moment. Happy the gardener with only a bay-window to care for! The need for accumulating more than the use of the moment demands lies in the impossibility of otherwise having at hand facilities when they are needed. The sight-seer finds nothing but a curious scene in half an acre of seed beds, thickly studded with little labels which mark the lines where thousands of kinds of seeds lie awaiting the quickening action of sun and rain; but to the student of morphology its value is untold. The sightseer, too, is impressed with but a small part of the things that he sees in passing through a large collection of even the most beautiful plants. A mass of color, a clump of graceful foliage, repeated in different