The material accumulated for the exploitation of popular knowledge of plants also affords an excellent basis for the induction of students into the more strictly scientific aspects of botany, and when supplemented by laboratories furnished with apparatus, microscopes, and other instruments of precision, the activities of these students may be carried beyond the frontiers of the subject in the investigation and discovery of new facts and phenomena. This extension of the boundaries of knowledge concerning the plant world may be carried on to advantage, only when a library is at hand, which contains all of the more important literature bearing upon the subject. The descriptions of the results of such researches should be made in publications devoted exclusively to this purpose, in accordance with the practice of all the more important botanical institutions in the world. The general scope of the New York Botanical Garden has already been described by the writer in a previous number of this magazine (January, 1897). The greater part of its actual construction and organization has taken place in the last three years, and it has now entered upon the discharge of its chief functions. [Illustration: MAP OF THE GARDEN.] The Garden comprises two hundred and fifty acres of land in Bronx Park, in the City of New York, which was set aside for that purpose by the Department of Public Parks in 1895. A fireproof museum building of stone, brick and terra cotta, 308 by 110 feet, has been erected for the Garden by the city in the western part of the grounds, near the Bedford Park Station of the New York Central Railroad. The building has a basement floor and three stories, with a total floor space of nearly two acres, and a window area equal to half that of the floor area. The basement contains a lecture theater capable of seating seven hundred people, two large exhibition halls, preparation rooms, constant temperature laboratory, offices and storerooms. The first floor is devoted to a collection of economic plants, and the temporary installation of useful products in the way of foods, drugs, timbers, woods, fibers, gums, waxes, resins, oils, sugars, starches, poisons, utensils, etc., gives hints as to the great diversity of uses that may be made of vegetable products, together with an illustration of their method of preparation and their derivation.