WANT OF A

BOTANICAL (;ARDEN in NEW YORK

Remarks of Ex-Chief Justice

Crs bk. DALY,

AST A:

Meeting held on May toth, 1891,

TO TAKE ACTION- UNDER THE LAW ENACTED BY
THE LEGISLATURE FOR THE ESTABLISHMENT
OF A BOTANICAL GARDEN IN THE

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REMARKS

OF

BocOMikE: JUSTICE DAEY

The necessity of a botanical garden in the City of
New York may be presented from two points of
view.

1, Its scientific importance and utility for the
development, improvement and preservation of the
vegetable kingdom, and 2, Its value as a place of
recreation and instruction for all classes of the
people, and especially for the working classes, who
have little leisure for recreation, and whose means
do not admit of their indulging in much expense.

The scientific value and utility of such an institu-
tion cannot be too strongly stated. We depend
upon the vegetable kingdom for the food of man
and of animals; for the wood devoted to such a
variety of uses and employed in so many handicrafts ;
for the textile fabrics that are required for clothing
and other purposes, and for the plants upon which
we depend so largely for the cure of diseases. What-
ever, therefore, tends to preserve it, to increase its
products and their adaptation to the use of mankind,
is of the highest utility, and it is for this service
that botanical gardens are required.

+

There is not a plant that grows that has not its
use for man, if he can discover it, and it is to such
discoverers in the past that we owe largely our pres-
ent civilization and the benefits it confers. We are
indebted to the monks of the middle ages for the
preservation not only, but also for the knowledge of
the uses of many of the important plants upon
which we now depend for food and for other pur-
poses. Attached to each monastery was a farm, and
generally a large one, in which all, from the abbot
downward, performed the manual labor requisite for
its cultivation, by which the monks maintained their
bodies in health, and produced, not only what was
necessary for their own support, but what enabled
them from their abundance to be liberal to the poor.
I speak of the orders then largely distributed over
Europe that connected land cultivation with the
religious life, such as the Cistercians, Carthusians
and others, to whom, not only their own age, but
posterity, is deeply indebted. They generally estab-
lished their monasteries in desert and barren places,
which they made productive by their physical labor
and their intelligence. Loudon,in his work on botany,
says that without the labor of these farmer-monks,
many provinces of Europe which at present nourish
thousands of inhabitants would have remained
deserts and marshes, the resorts only of wild beasts
and the scources of disease, and that gardening as
one of the arts of design, instead of being, as it is now,
generally diffused, would have been lost to the

greater part of Europe. They had large orchards
for the raising of fruit, and either within the
monastic enclosure, or annexed to it, a large gar-
den for the cultivation of flowers. vines and the
higher plants that are useful in medicine; gardens
which served alike as a place of recreation and for
the careful study of plant life as well as the making
of experiments, to which from their secluded lives
they were enabled to devote the necessary time. _

In addition to this, those of the brethren that
went out as missionaries to pagan lands, being from
their previous occupation more or less of botanists,
were close observers of the vegetation of the coun-
tries through which they passed, especially in the
then imperfectly known parts of Asia and northern
Africa, and when they found anything that was
new to them which they considered interesting or
useful and which they thought capable of being
cultivated in Europe, they brought back with them
seeds or specimens to be planted in gardens of their
own institution or at some other monastic establish-
ment where the atmospheric conditions were favor-
able, and in this way many of the best varieties of
fruit, especially of apples and pears, were introduced
inte Europe.

They did even more. They imparted the knowl]-
edge they had acquired by their own experiments or
obtained from distant lands to the peasantry and
agricultural classes in their vicinity by making them
acquainted with new plants that could be raised for

food, and with better methods of cultivation, and
how great their influence throughout Europe was at
a time when, by four centuries of continuous and
desolating wars, its ancient civilization had been
swept away and it had been reduced almost to a
state of semi-barbarism, may be inferred from the
fact that the Cistercian monks had more than one
hundred of these establishments, or as I may appro-
priately call them botanic gardens, in England
alone.

Important as these establishments were at that
period, they are not less important now in conse-
quence of the increased population of the globe. In
my youth the population of the earth was computed
to be 700 millions. Itis now, that is, it was in 1890,
estimated at 1,487 millions, and statisticians say that
if it should increase hereafter at the same rate that it
has since the time of Marlborough, in the reign of
Queen Anne, it will be in 182 years from the
present time, 5,997 millions. One hundred and
eighty-two years is a comparatively short period
in the history of mankind, and the question arises
whether the Earth, at the expiration of that time,
will be able to supply such a population with food,
raiment and fuel. The statisticians say that it will,
if more efficient means are used for preserving the
animal and vegetable kingdom, and one obvious
means of doing so is the establishment of botanical
gardens, where the nature, growth, diseases, de-
velopment and distribution of plants can be care-

ee

fully studied by men thoroughly trained, from the
scientific principal and his assistants to the lowest
subordinate; men who practically devote their lives
to this service.

In every country in Europe, and in France, Ger-
many and Holland in nearly every town, there isa
botanic garden; whilst in North America, with a
population of 89 millions, 60 millions of which are
in the United States, there is but one botanic garden
worthy of the name, the one established in St.
Louis by the gift of the late Mr. Shaw. Not only
in Europe but in countries where nature is excep-
tionally prolific both in the abundance and in the
variety of its vegetable products, such gardens are
regarded as necessary and have been established in
Mexico, in Brazil, in Sumatra and in Borneo. Are
we so favored as to make them unnecessary in North
America? Allow me to call your attention to what
Mr. Ravenstien says, in 1890, of the North Ameri-
can continents, in estimating the number of people
that the earth will support: ‘‘ Agriculture is there,”
he says, ‘‘carried on in a wasteful style, the cultivator
looking only to immediate returns, and having no
thought of the prosperity of his descendants. If
you travel from Montreal to Washington you pass
millions of acres of land once most productive, but
which now produce nothing, the forests having been
devastated in the most reckless way; swamps and
sandy places now take the place of trees. This
will be mended in the course of time. The exhaus-

ted soil of the Eastern States will recover, and forests
where they have been wantonly destroyed will be
replanted,” adding: ‘‘that as the population in-
creases, the resources of the country will be more
carefully husbanded, and it is for that work now
that botanical gardens are so necessary, for not only
are forests destroyed, but the most useful species of
plants, as I have said, perish from neglect, wanton
destruction, climatic changes and other causes.
One or two illustrations will suftice to show how
botanical gardens arrest and prevent this. The
cinchona tree, from which we get the quinine, so
indispensable both as a preventive and for the cure of
the malarious fevers which exist so extensively over
the globe, was found only in Peru, and, from the
great demand for it, the trees were so wantonly
destroyed that there was serious apprehension
of its total extinction in a very short time. Dr.
Hooker, of the botanical gardens at Kew, near London,
induced a very capable gentleman, Mr. Clements M.
Markham, to go to Peru, and study the climateric
conditions essential to the growth of the tree, that it
might be transplanted to other parts of the earth
where the same favorable conditions exist. Mr.
Markham carefully studied the subject and brought
back with him a number of young trees, which
were carefully nursed at Kew. It was then de-
termined that a certain part of India would be
favorable, to which they were sent and _ planted.
The experiment proved successful and there are now

9

five millions of these trees growing in India. In the
same way Ipecacuanha was saved from perishing by
finding a new home for it in Singapore.

The coffee plant in India suffered from the fun-
gold pest, and in the West Indies from the voluta fly.
It was found by experiments at Kew that it could
be grown in Liberia, free from those pests, and the
Liberian coffee is now a prominent article of com-
merce.

It would take more time than the brief space of
my remarks will admit to show what has been ac-
complished in Kew and other great establishments
of the kind in studying the causes injurious to vege-
tation and the way to avert them; of the atmospheric
conditions essential to the growth of plants, and
where those conditions can be found in different
parts of the globe, and of the experiments that have
been carried on, and the successful and important
results that have followed. What I have said, I
think, will suffice to show the scientific value and
utility of a botanic garden of the kind I have stated,
particularly in this, the largest city of the Union.

I will now say a few words respecting its value as
a place of public recreation for the numerous class
here that live by their daily labor, a class whose
opportunities for enjoyment are very limited, hav-
ing, as I have said, little leisure, and little means
beyond what is necessary for their support. They
constitute the greater part of the community, and
whose contentment with their lot is of the highest

10

importance to the maintenance of public order.
‘It is especially so at this period, when we hear
so much about the conflict between capital and
labor, of the hostility to the building up of colossal
fortunes, and the keeping and transmitting them
without doing any thing for the public welfare,
or for the working classes, whose labor made
the making of them possible; the loud complaint
of the anarchist of the inequality between the
rich and the poor, and the remedy which he ad-
vocates—an appeal to force—to rectify it, the anti-
dote to which is the willingness of the rich to devote
a portion of their wealth in loving consideration of
what may promote the welfare and add to the enjoy-
ment of their less fortunate fellow-citizens. A great
botanical garden in this large metropolis would ac-
complish a great deal in this way. The poorest man
can enjoy what it offers as much as the richest. He
sees there what is brought together from many lands,
which he could not see without that extensive travel
for which he has neither the leisure nor the means;
and how much this recreation is enjoyed by all
classes is sufficiently shown by the fact that the
number of persons that visited the gardens at Kew
in 1890 was over 800,000, or about one-fourth of the
entire population of London.

In the ordering of our lives, recreation and amuse-
ment is aS necessary to our well-being as labor.
‘‘He that would make a good use of his life,” says
Locke, ‘‘must allow a portion of it to recreation.”

1G!

“Recreation,” says Bishop Hall, “‘is to the mind
what whetting is to the scythe: it sharpens the edge
of it. He, however, who spends his whole life in
recreation is ever whetting and never mowing, and
he that toils and never recreates, is ever mowing and
might as well have no scythe as no edge.”

The public interest that is felt in what a great
botanical garden affords may be illustrated by
flowers alone. According to a recent article in the
New York Herald, flower-raising in this country, as
a business, a quarter of a century ago was compar-
atively insignificant, and there are now 5,000 estab-
lishments engaged in raising plants and flowers;
more than 300 of which are owned by women.
Forty million dollars is invested as capital in this
industry, and more than 20,000 persons are em-
ployed. The value of this product by the last census
was $26,000,000—$12,000,000 for shrubs, $14,000, -
000 for cut flowers, and of these there were more
than 50,000,000 of roses. These establishments now
exist in every State of the Union. There are 800 in
the State of New York alone. There was not in the
year 1880 fifty flower stores in the City of New
York. There are now 250, to which I may add the
significant fact stated by the Census Bureau that
the love of flowers in this country is growing among
all classes, the poor as well as the rich. An English
writer has said ‘“‘the cultivation of flowers is of
all the amusements of mankind, the one to be
selected as the most innocent and the most devoid of

injury or annoyance to others; the pleasure it im-
parts is harmless and pure; it is one in which the
poor may indulge as well as the rich, and that
affords an unceasing source of enjoyment, without
emulation, contention or ill-will,” to which I may
add, we give flowers to the bride, for they are the
loveliest type of marriage; we lay them on the coffin
as the most touching emblem of death, and we
find in their decay and their renewal a symbol of the
resurrection.

Mary Howitt, in one of the most felicitous of her
poems, answers the question, What is the use of the
flowers ? and with her lines I will close my remarks:

“Our outward life requires them not,

Why, therefore, had they birth—

To minister delight to man
And beautify the earth ?

To comfort man, to whisper hope
Whene’er his faith is dim,

For who so careth for the flowers
Will care much more for him.