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known, for which Mr. Darwin left a bequest. Mr. Daydon Jackson, Secretary to the Linnæan Society, has had the work in hand over three years, and it is not nearly finished. He employs a staff at the British Museum also. The catalogue of the library is not printed, but is contained in a ponderous manuscript volume in the keeper's room. The books include, besides all modern volumes and pamphlets on botany, a great number of those antique curiosities which bibliomaniacs treasure.

The work at Kew covers a vast field. In the first place officially stand the botanic interests to study new plants and class them. Next, where plants are wanted for cultivation, which can not be obtained readily in the market, or which the service of the public demands, the Royal Gardens will supply them if possible. Where diseases, vegetable or animal or insect pests, threaten local plantations, Kew will look into the matter and consult with experts at home. Kew is ready also to report and to obtain advice upon new-industries which those upon the spot suggest. Furthermore, it keeps an eye on all institutions of the same class throughout the British Empire, which act in concert with their great model in the mother-country, and through it with one another. Foreign institutions co-operate in like manner with Kew to a certain extent. From time to time the authorities of Kew publish a list of new plants, which at present seem to average five hundred to six hundred a quarter, including those renamed for scientific purposes. From time to time, also, they publish a list of the seeds matured in the Royal Gardens, which are exchanged, on application, with all regular correspondents. One of these seed-lists includes something like four thousand species. This magazine of seeds is collected, nominally, for the benefit of institutions which may be able some time to return the favor in part, but in practice no one who applies with a serious purpose for seeds or plants is refused. How the rapidly increasing population of the globe is to be provided with food and clothing is a problem which the authorities of Kew believe falls within their department. They welcome every vegetable product which is reported to have qualities that make it useful to mankind, whether as a food, a medicine, a convenience, or a substance useful in manufactures. They are glad to report upon specimens of such substances, or to obtain the reports of trustworthy experts.

The story of the cinchona plantations is a good instance of the work of the Royal Gardens. Some forty years ago both the English and the Dutch authorities in the East Indies took alarm at the growing price of quinine, due to the rapid decrease of the forests of cinchona in Peru. The Dutch moved first, and imported a great number of seeds and seedlings, which they planted in Java at a heavy cost. But, probably because they had no Kew to advise them, the Dutch had chosen a species which was hardly worth growing, and the plantations have been long since uprooted. For some years the English Government confined itself to importing seeds and plants, which died on the passage to India. This was evidently futile, and Sir William Hooker urged a systematic procedure. Mr. Clements Markham, in 1859, was sent to Peru to collect seeds and young trees. When he returned, his precious stores were received at the Gardens, nursed, and transmitted to India with trifling loss. This effort was successful. In the plantations of Bengal, laid out and managed by officers recommended by Sir William Hooker, there were, at the date of the latest report, about five million trees. From Kew cinchona-trees have been distributed also to all parts of the world where there was a chance for successful cultivation. The plantations of Ceylon are only inferior to those of Bengal; in Jamaica the sales of bark exceed £5,000 a year; the tree has been introduced also into St. Helena, Trinidad, Mauritius, Cape of Good Hope, Queensland, and many other settlements. The output of the cinchona drugs from these sources up to 1880 was 87,704 pounds, which, taking quinine at an average value of two dollars an ounce, would represent $2,806,528.

Ipecacuanha is a plant scarcely less important than cinchona itself. But few members of the vegetable kingdom so absolutely refuse to exist under anything short of perfectly satisfactory conditions. In 1866 Sir Joseph Hooker sent a specimen to the Botanical Gardens at Calcutta, which promptly died. Then a struggle began in which the advantage was now on one side, then on the other. In 1875 the Director of the Calcutta Gardens triumphantly reported that he had one hundred thousand nice young plants, but in 1886 the strain received from Kew direct alone survived-less than five per cent--and all hope of successful cultivation in India has been abandoned long since. Plants had been sent out to Singapore, however, in 1875, with much more lively confidence, and there perseverance found its reward. Ipecacuanha is established in the Old World at last, and the authorities of Kew may be trusted to diffuse the cultivation. Another instance is Liberian coffee, distributed from Kew to take the place of that grown in the East Indies, which was affected by a fungoid pest, and that of the West Indies, which suffered from the white fly. Liberian coffee, moreover, will thrive in hot and moist situations, where the Arabian variety is unable even to live. It has been introduced in a great many places, but, although its growth is very promising, it has nowhere become the general crop. This imperfect success was another problem for the investigators of Kew, and the solution is now believed to be found in the fact that the treatment proper for the Arabian berry after gathering is not suited to the Liberian, with a widely different pulp.

Among the many questions sent to Kew from all parts of the world, there must be some of trivial importance, or which could be perfectly well answered at the local botanic gardens. But all genuine inquiries receive attention. Debate has been gravely held, opinions even have been formed and reported upon such matters as a South African cane which some gentleman in those distant parts thought adapted for fishing-rods; upon the value of West African palm-kernels as material for coat-buttons; upon a pithy stem which the government of a West India island believed suitable for razor-strops.

One function of a national institution very seriously regarded at Kew is the training of young men to fill botanic situations in the colonies. Something is demanded of such young men beyond the practical knowledge which suffices at home. Instruction is given them in the principles of scientific botany, and those general conditions which rule the practice of horticulture under differing circumstances. The advantage of this system all around scarcely needs illustration. While serving the interest of the colonies, it increases the sources of information for Kew, since all these emigrants keep up more or less of a correspondence with the institution in which they were trained.

The village of Kew lies on the south side of the Thames, about six miles westward from Hyde Park Corner in London. "The Gardens" are a favorite resort for holiday-makers and tourists, being visited by six or seven hundred thousand persons yearly. Painters also flock there in summer-time. When the crown surrendered its rights to them in 1840, the Gardens had an area of eleven acres, and contained ten greenhouses of one sort or another. Sir William Hooker promptly begged permission to annex the Orangery and the land adjacent; then a part of the Pleasure Grounds; and after that the Royal Kitchen and Forcing Grounds. All these petitions being granted, by 1847 the Gardens had reached their present dimensions-about seventy acres. Three years later the rest of the Pleasure Grounds was granted for the establishment of an Arboretum, making the total area little less than two hundred and fifty acres. "The Arboretum is the richest in Europe, no doubt," says the writer in The Saturday Review, "but probably inferior to that of Harvard University, where special attention has been paid to this department." This admission in a British journal, and The Saturday Review above all others, should be very gratifying to Americans. The failure of Kew's Arboretum to be the finest in the world is explained on the ground that the soil-sandy and shallow, resting on a stratum of gravel-is unsuited to many kinds of trees. In former times, also, when an imperial collection had to be got together as quickly as possible, and as cheaply, specimens were not planted with the care which might have overcome the disadvantage. It became necessary to reconstruct the Arboretum twenty years ago on this account. A singular example of the influence of fashion in gardening then came to light. The British public had been running after evergreens so hotly that nurserymen had ceased to grow deciduous species. It seems incredible that the authorities of Kew should have asked in vain for months throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland, for young aspens. As for American oaks, maples, etc., they absolutely could not be found in the kingdom. Unscientific lovers of the beautiful may rejoice that it has not yet been found necessary to interfere with the old forest trees, planted, perhaps, by Lord Capel. The new-comers are arranged by genus-all the willows, for example, with the alders, around the pretty lake, pines here, cedars there, oaks, nuts, maples, tamarisks, camellias, ranunculus, etc., etc.

In the Garden proper the smaller plants are found in bewildering array. No list of the species represented at Kew has been taken since that of the younger Aiton in 1810, but one is now being made. Some departments have been catalogued already. Of orchids, there are about 1,400 species; ferns, 1,100; stove plants, 2,500; succulents, 1,000; palms and cycads, 500; greenhouse plants, 3,000; herbaceous, 4,000; trees and shrubs, 3,000; in several cases, however, the figure is but a guess as yet. The total, great as it will prove to be, bears but a small proportion to the sum of Nature's wealth. If we take the flowering plants alone, as enumerated in Bentham and Hooker's Genera Plantarum, there are two hundred natural orders, 10,000 genera, and 100,000 species; and this leaves out of account the ferns and all the lower orders of Cryptogamia. The Economic Section has few visitors, and they are not tempted to carry exploration far. Not a few of the culinary and medicinal herbs in use are found here. If by some fatal chance the onion of commerce should be exterminated in the back-gardens of England, Kew is prepared to replace it. Side by side therewith grow the patience-dock and the skunk-cabbage, the briony, the cuckoo-pint, the Japanese yam, and the all-good. In ferns the Kew collection is exceedingly rich. It has had three special benefactors in this department, to the first of whom, Mr. George C. Joad, the public is indebted for the charming rock-garden opened in 1881. Sir Joseph Hooker had long been working for one, and the bequest of Mr. Joad's collection of ferns brought the matter to a crisis. Dr. Cooper Forster was an enthusiast upon the culture of filmy ferns, and Mr. W. C. Carbonell was specially interested in the cultivation of hardy ferns, particularly in the crossing of them, and the development of sports. Both these gentlemen bequeathed their treasures for the nation's enjoyment when their own power of enjoying them ended.

The glass houses at Kew are extensive structures. The Winter Garden covers more than an acre and a half of ground. The Palm House is three hundred and sixty-two feet long and one hundred feet wide. The new Orchid House is one hundred and forty feet in length, adding the two wings together. This last is not wholly satisfactory-to the orchid enthusiast an orchid house never is, nor can be. Supplemented, however, by a low, neat range, from which the public is excluded, nearly all the 1,400 species which form the national collection thrive admirably. British orchidists are proud of Kew-nowadays for it was not so satisfactory in this department a few years since.

M

SKETCH OF HENRY R. SCHOOLCRAFT.

R. SCHOOLCRAFT was a conspicuous figure in the scientific life of the early part of the century. A pioneer in some fields, the immediate follower of the pioneers in others, he was, in all the branches of research to which he gave attention, earnest, ready, diligent, sagacious, original, and modest. As among his titles to be remembered, the biographer who prefaces his Personal Memoirs names the early period at which he entered the field of observation in the United States as a naturalist; the enterprise he manifested in exploring the geography and geology of the Great West; and his subsequent researches as an ethnologist in investigating the Indian languages and history. "To him we are indebted for our first accounts of the geological constitution and the mineral wealth and resources of the great valley beyond the Alleghanies, and he is the discoverer of the actual source of the Mississippi River in Itasca Lake. For many years, beginning with 1817, he stirred up a zeal for natural history from one end of the land to the other, and, after his settlement in the West, he was a point of approach for correspondents"-on these topics and for all the Indian tribes.

HENRY ROWE SCHOOLCRAFT was born in Albany County, N. Y., March 28, 1793, and died in Washington, D. C., December 10, 1864. He was the descendant, in the third generation, of an Englishman, James Calcraft, who, having served with credit in the armies of the Duke of Marlborough, came to America in the reign of George II, in the military service, and was present at operations connected with the building of Forts Anne, Edward, and William Henry. After these campaigns he settled in Albany County as a land-surveyor, married, and in his old age conducted a large school-the first English school that was taught in that frontier region. In connection with this incident his name became

VOL. XXXVII.-9

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