This review of the advance of the century in the study of land forms, the habitations of all the higher forms of life, might have been concerned wholly with the concrete results of exploration, as was implied in an earlier paragraph. Travels in the Far East of the Old World, or in the Far West of the New, have yielded fact enough to fill volumes. But such a view of the century has been here replaced by another; not because the first is unimportant, for it is absolutely essential, but because the second includes the first and goes beyond it. Not the facts alone, but the principles that the facts exemplify, demand our attention. These principles, founded upon a multitude of observations, are the greater contribution of the closing to the opening century in the study of the Forms of the Land. THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN. BY DANIEL TREMBLY MACDOUGAL, DIRECTOR OF THE LABORATORIES. A botanical garden is a museum of plants in the broadest sense of the term, and its chief purpose is to represent, by means of living specimens so far as possible, the principal types of the vegetation of the globe. It is obviously impossible to cultivate on any small area more than a few thousand of the quarter of a million of species in existence, and hence the plantations are supplemented by preserved specimens to illustrate the forms, which, by reasons of limitation of space, climate and soil, cannot be grown in the locality. In addition the species which formed the vegetation of the previous geological periods are represented by fossil specimens completing the history of the plant world so far as it is known, and yielding suggestions as to the descent of the present types. Two general educational purposes are served by an institution of this character. Its collections are arranged to present information on the form, relationship, mode of life, habit and general biological character of the principal types of vegetation, in such manner as to be capable of comprehension by persons unacquainted with the technical aspects of the subject. Further interpretation of such facts may be made by means of books, journals, and lectures devoted entirely to this phase of the subject.