Perhaps, however, none of these had the importance of the solemn entrance, on June 30, 1827, of dame giraffe into the good city of Paris. Everyone wished to see her, all the newspapers were full of her, articles and songs were written about her, and fashion, that other dispenser of glory, used her forms and colors to make the giraffe dress, the giraffe hat, the giraffe comb. Nevers had polychromic crockery; Épinal, illuminated images that represented the celebrated visitor. Even politics meddled with her, and some amateurs possess in their collections a bronze medal upon which is seen the giraffe addressing the country in terms similar to the historic words used by the Comte d'Artois in 1814,1 "Nothing is changed in France; there is only

one beast more." I need not explain why this medal quickly became very rare.

Giraffe, hippopotamus, chimpanzee, etc., all these animals assembled together, sometimes to the number of 1,300 to 1,400, have constituted a special school of instruction that for one hundred years has played a most important part. As Isidore Geoffroy-Saint-Hilaire wrote in 1860, if the menagerie had not existed and had not been enriched from the very first with a great number of rare species, Cuvier would never have been able at the beginning of our century to publish his Comparative Anatomy and to prepare in this way a new life for zoology and the birth of paleontology; and Étienne Geoffroy would not in his turn, twenty years later, have written his Philosophical Anatomy. I will add, that if it had not been for the menagerie Isidore Geoffroy himself, Blainville, Duvernoy, H.-Milne Edwards, P. Gervais, Gratiolet, and many others would not have brought together the materials for the memoirs with which they have enriched science.

Without the menagerie Frederic Cuvier, who was an aid there as early as 1805, would not have written his studies on the instinct and intelligence of animals, etc. Without the menagerie the remarkable studies of M. Alphonse-Milne Edwards would not have been concluded, and we would doubtless be unacquainted with the conditions of hybridization among the pithecoid apes, the equidæ, the bovidæ, etc.2 Without the menagerie many species of herbivoræ and a number of useful birds would not be acclimated in our country, and the museum would not have been able to renew, in a degree, the great fauna of our forests.3

It is now known that this saying was ascribed to the Comte d'Artois by Beugnot. (Memoires, pages 112-114; Paris, 1886.)

2 Hybrids have been obtained at the museum by crossing the magot with the macaque, the magot with the cynocephalus, the macaque with various pouched monkeys, the horse with the onager, the horse with the zebra, the zebra with the onager, the ass with the onager, the zebra with the ass, the yak with the cow (the male is infertile, the female fertile), etc.

3 The names of some of the species acclimated in the Jardin are as follows: The onager and the sambur deer brought by Dussumier, the pig deer, the sika deer of Japan, the muntjak deer of China, the gnu, the moufflon of the Atlas Mountains, the Egyptian goose, the black swan, the emen which we owe to Péron, the nandou, the Chinese crane introduced by Montigny, numerous pheasants, etc.

Finally, without the menagerie French art would not be able to add to its list some of the most illustrious names of modern times, that of Barye, for example, or of Fremiet, his successor.

The menagerie furnishes each year a great number of subjects to the scalpel of the anatomist, and those of you gentlemen who represent zoological studies in the provinces know to what an extent the museum has aided, thanks to its menagerie, the enrichment of public collections. All these results have been obtained since 1793, in spite of quite unfavorable conditions, in confined quarters, badly protected against the rigors of winter, with limited means, and an insufficient force of employees. What a renewal of progress may we not hope, now that a rejuvenated staff, active and above all competent, makes its kindly influence felt everywhere in the museum, and the public administrators make known each year, by voting subsidies for long-wished-for improvements, their interest in the institution founded by the national convention.

Much has been done at the Jardin des Plantes for science and for the country during the century now ending; no less labor and devotion will be given in the century about to begin. And without doubt the chronicler who a hundred years hence shall take the place at this tribune that the kindness of the committee has to day accorded to me will have the honor and the pleasure of celebrating before a select audience other great names and great events.

BOTANICAL OPPORTUNITY.'

By WILLIAM TRELEASE.

In selecting a subject for the first presidential address before the Botanical Society of America, which you have done me the honor of requiring of me, I have deviated somewhat from the customary lines of such addresses, inasmuch as I have not attempted to present an abstract of recent general progress in botany, nor any results of my own investigation. Such topics, indeed, are more likely than the one I have chosen to interest an assemblage of specialists like this society; but as the society is supposed to have as a principal object the promotion of research, the present has seemed a fitting occasion to address, through the society, the large and growing number of young botanists who may be expected to look to this society for a certain amount of help and inspiration in the upbuilding of their own scientific careers; hence it comes that I have selected as my subject "Opportunity."

Let us for a moment compare the conditions under which scientific work is done to-day with those prevalent in the past. From a purely utilitarian, and, for a time, perhaps almost instinctive knowledge of plants and their properties, beginning, it may be, before our race can be said to have bad a history, through the pedantry of the Middle Ages with their ponderous tomes, botany, almost within our memory, stands as the scientific diversion or pastime of men whose serious business in life was of a very different nature. Such training as the earlier botanists had was obtained as being primarily useful in other pursuits than pure research, though there is abundant evidence that the master often enjoined upon the pupil the possibilities of botanical study, and no doubt he stretched the limits of botanical instruction deemed necessary, just as is done to-day in technical schools, in the hope that the surplus might be so used as to increase the general store of knowledge; but, at best, training was limited, and research was recreation and relaxation.

But our predecessors, even the generation immediately before us, lived under conditions which made it possible for a man to hold high place in the business or professional world, to accumulate wealth in

'Address of the retiring president, delivered before the Botanical Society of America, at Buffalo, N. Y., August 21, 1896. From the Botanical Gazette, Vol. XIII.

commerce, and at the same time to devote much time to the study of nature. To-day the man who is not entirely a business man is better out of business, and, with few exceptions, the man who is not entirely a student is little better than a dilettante in science. Concentration is the order of the day, and specialization is the lot of most men. But specialization, the keynote of progressive evolution, is always intimately associated with a division of labor. Fortunately, the men who enter and win in the great game of commerce and manufacture see in a more or less clear way that nearly every great manufacturing or commercial advance has grown out of a succession of obscure discoveries made by the devotee to pure science, often considered by him, indeed, only as so many more words deciphered in the great and mysterious unread book of nature, but sooner or later adapted and applied for the benefit of all men by the shrewd mind of a master in the art of money-making. To these men, successful in business, we owe it that to-day not only are some men able to devote their entire time to scientific research and the propagation of knowledge, but that their work is done under favorable conditions, and with a wealth of aids and adjuncts that would hardly have been thought of a generation ago.

Instead of a smattering of systematic botany and organography, given as an adjunct to chemistry, medicine, or engineering, the student who wishes may to day equip himself for a life of research in botany, by a considerable amount of preparatory work in the lower schools, beginning, perhaps, even in the kindergarten, and by devoting the larger part of his undergraduate time in college to the elements of the subject in the broadest and, if he wish, technical scope, having the benefit of marvelously detailed appliances and a broad knowledge of general facts. If he can and will work for a higher university degree, thus equipped, he may delve into the depths of the most limited specialty, guided for a time by those who have already broken soil there, and left at last with a rich and unexplored vein for his own elaboration. With this training, if he be fortunate in securing a position offering opportunity for research, or if he enjoy independent means, he may hope for a lifetime of more or less uninterrupted oppor tunity for unearthing the wealth of discovery that lies just within his reach.

Considering the prevalent conditions, my subject naturally divides itself into two quite distinct parts: the opportunity of institutions and of individuals. We stand to-day, apparently, at a transition point. Most of the active workers of the present time are college professors, who have done the research work that has made their names known, during the leisure that could be found in the year's routine of instruction or during their long vacations, and with facilities nominally secured for class use, or, in many instances, like those of a generation ago, the private property of the investigator. Even when appreciated at something like its true value, their original work, for the most part, has been closely watched to prevent it from encroaching upon the first duty,