Abstract
SIR JOSEPH HOOKER'S Annual Report for 1877 is more than usually bulky, extending to fifty-three pages. The report opens with the number of visitors admitted to the gardens during the year, which amounted to 687,972, a great excess over those of the preceding year. The points of public interest first treated of by the Director are, as might have been supposed, those affecting the agitation to remove the boundary wall along the Richmond Road and to open the gardens at an earlier hour. These points have been so freely discussed of late in the public press that we need do no more than refer to them. Referring to his visit to North America, Sir Joseph pays a high tribute to the intelligence and courtesy of the people. He says: “I cannot adequately express my sense of the liberality with which travelling facilities and hospitalities of all kinds were accorded to me by public companies and private individuals wherever I went in America. The fact of my being connected with this establishment [Kew] was a recognised passport, and this even in the remote settlements of the Far West, for I found a reading people everywhere, few of whom had not heard of Kew Gardens. In the Northern States of America the progress of science, and of institutions for the instruction of the people in science, occupy a prominent place in the cheap illustrated periodical literature of the masses; and nowhere on the globe is this literature better or so universally read as in the States. It is hence not wonderful that the progress of such establishments as Kew, the British Museum, South Kensington Museum, &c., should be better known amongst all classes of the people there than they are in the United Kingdom generally, and so I found it.”
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KEW GARDENS REPORT . Nature 18, 370–371 (1878). https://doi.org/10.1038/018370a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/018370a0