Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/431

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GREAT need in the formation of the collections of tropical and subtropical plants of the New York Botanical Garden and elsewhere in the United States has been a suitable place in the American tropics where seeds could be germinated and cuttings and seedlings grown under natural conditions for periods up to two or three years, before their transportation. Plants can be germinated and grown under glass, but in many instances it is desirable or even necessary that they should be cultivated in the open, and the care of such nurseries is far less expensive than that of propagating houses. Larger plants collected in the tropical forests are also transported to the temperate zone only with difficulty and with considerable loss unless they have been again rooted in the tropics and sent north in pots or tubs, sections of bamboo stems being readily available for this purpose. I came to realize this condition on my trip to the West Indies in the autumn of 1901, in company with Mr. Cowell, director of the Buffalo Botanic Garden, and we discussed the project for the establishment of a nursery a great deal, and concluded that in order to make as complete an exhibition of tender plants as possible in our northern conservatories such an adjunct to our work was necessary.

During Professor Underwood's recent extended visit to the island of Jamaica, while pursuing his investigation of the ferns of tropical America, he learned that the building and grounds of the colonial government at Cinchona were offered for rental and he at once communicated this fact to me. It has long been the desire of all American botanists that arrangements should in some way be made for a laboratory in the American tropics, to which investigators could conveniently go for the purpose of carrying on studies of tropical and subtropical plants growing under natural conditions, instead of under the necessarily artificial conditions which glass houses afford in the temperate zone. This matter was taken up as long ago as 1897, when the island of Jamaica was visited by Dr. D. T. MacDougal and Professor D. H. Campbell, who, at the request of other American botanists, made an examination of available sites for such a laboratory, and decided that this very place. Cinchona, was the one probably best adapted to the purpose in view. At that time, however, the Department of Public Gardens and Plantations of Jamaica was using these buildings and grounds as a part of their agricultural and horticultural system