Commissioners can contemplate accepting and maintaining such a collection after it has been established by this society, and if legislative action be necessary, would the commission favor such legislation. The officers of the society are, President, Charles Sedgwick Minot; Vice-Presidents, Dr. Henry P. Bowditch and Mr. John E. Thayer; Treasurer, Rev. James Ells. "Yours very truly, "(Signed) EDWARD C. GARDINER, "Secretary."

The favoring attitude of the present head of the Metropolitan Park Commission, Mr. W. B. de Las Casas, was shown in his letter of reply, dated December 22, 1904:

"Dr. Edward G. Gardiner,

"131 Mt. Vernon Street, Boston. "Dear Sir:-In reply to your letter of December 12th, and confirming statements made to you and Mr. Pope at a conference with the Metropolitan Park Commission on December 21st, I am asked by the Commission to say that the idea regarding the establishment of a zoological garden or park in the neighborhood of Boston, expressed in your letter to this Board, is of very great public interest and that we will be very glad to make an investigation of the matter in the hope that it may prove practical to allow the establishment of such a Zoo in the Metropolitan parks and, preferably, as you suggest, in the Stony Brook Reservation. We will also be glad to consider the matter more in detail as you are able to furnish details. Should our conclusions be favorable we will be glad to approve the presentation of the matter by you to the legislature for special authority to enable us to receive and maintain your gift.

"Very truly yours, "(Signed) W. B. DE LAS CASAS, "Chairman."

As the question of sites was studied expert opinion veered from Stony Brook Woods, a reservation of about 450 acres south of Boston, to the

Middlesex Fells, the extensive and beautiful forest reservation of 3,000 acres laying in Medford, Malden, Melrose, Winchester and Stoneham to the north. Upon the advice of Director W. T. Hornaday of the Bronx Zoological Park, it was decided to lay out a complete plan for very extensive collections of animals, even if at the outset, as seemed probable, a start would have to be made with a comparatively small section of the total scheme. The idea, of course, was to avoid patchwork and needless changes of scheme. Accordingly a relief model was made for a park to cover a tract of about 200 acres in the southern part of the Fells, near the head of Forest Street, Medford, and attracted much attention while on exhibition at the Boston1915 exposition in the old Museum of Fine Arts building, during November, 1909.

The right of the Society to arrange with the Metropolitan Park Commission for the use of this tract secured by the passage in 1907, largely through the efforts of Representative Norman H. White of Brookline, of House Bill No. 422, an act "To authorize the Metropolitan Park Commission to provide grounds for a Zoological Garden in the Middlesex Fells Reservation and to permit the Massachusetts Zoological Society to keep Animals, Plants, and Specimens there and exhibit the Same." The character of the permission is indicated in the two sections of the act which state respectively:

"Section 1. The Metropolitan Park Commission is hereby authorized to set apart a suitable tract of land within the limits of the Middlesex Fells Reservation, so-called, with sufficient approaches thereto, for a zoological garden, and to allow the Massachusetts Zoological Society the use of the same, rent free, subject to such rules and regulations as said Metropoitan Park Commission may establish therefor.

"Section 2. Said Massachusetts Zoological Society is hereby authorized to establish and maintain upon the land set apart in accordance with the pro

visions of section one, of this act, a zoological garden for the purposes for which said corporation was established."

This measure carried no appropriation for making the grounds suitable for receiving collections of animals or for policing and otherwise maintaining them. That defect it is now designed to correct, if possible, at the forthcoming session of the legislature. Measures to that intent have been adopted by a committee of the Zoological Society acting in conjunction with the Metropolitan Park Commission.

Precisely as the panic of 1893 put a quietus on the earlier attempts to establish zoological and aquarial gardens in Boston so the panic of 1907 all but eliminated the scheme of establishing

a zoological park. Estimates of the probable cost of suitably preparing the grounds at Middlesex Fells had been obtained from the engineer of the Park Commission while somewhat more than fifteen thousand dollars in conditional subscriptions were pledged by public-spirited citizens. Popular interest was well aroused and everybody realized how backward Boston had been and hoped the plan would succeed. But the intervention of the financial depression stopped all proceedings, and until October, 1909, the Zoological Society was moribund and practically nothing was done.

Meantime George E. Parkman had died leaving a very large residuary estate, the income of which, in accord

ance with the codicil appended in 1887, was to be applied to the improvement of parks then in existence in the city of Boston. That meant that the city fathers would be empowered to expend very considerable sums of money, if they should choose to do so, upon such collections of living animals and fish as other cites have within their borders. A proposition was made in the fall of 1908 by a former mayor of Boston to create out of the Parkman fund a zoological garden in Franklin Park. Mindful of the objections of experts and holding it reasonably certain that eventually the state of Massachusetts would do its part in completing the project at Middlesex Fells the Massachusetts Zoological Society offered as a counter proposal that a portion of the Parkman money be expended upon an aquarium at South Boston. This was the idea underlaying the resolution to appropriate eighty thousand dollars brought in the board of aldermen early in November of 1908 by Mr. J. Frank O'Hare of South Boston, the understanding being that the Zoological Society would serve as trustee of the aquarium thus created. Almost simultaneously with these happenings the Boston landscape architect, Herbert J. Kellaway, who had taken

charge of the public parks exhibit at the Boston-1915 exposition, secured the gratuitous co-operation of Willard Brown, an architect, in making a model for an aquarium building at Marine Park, following out Mr. Olmsted's original idea. This plan, a model of which was on exhibition at the Boston-1915 exposition, consists of a tract of land on Farragut Road, City Point, of almost eleven acres, containing three sheets of water for seal pools and the like of about four and onequarter acres in extent and of depth varying from four feet to twenty feet. While the walks shown on the model are not actually existing, the foundations for the same have already been prepared, and the expense of the grounds is thus seen to have been already taken care of.

Opposite the area between Second and Third streets a high plateau has been left to receive the building. This, as proposed, consists of a central domed hall with gallery for the arrangement of specimens, from which may be obtained views down the museum on either side, the one for marine, and the other for fresh water collections. tions. Here will be found specimens, skeletons, types and diagrams of all that goes to make up the two branches

details, remains to be seen. That it is worthy of adoption is, however, conceded by numerous experts. Some kind of collection of living fish at South Boston is already assured. The Massachusetts Zoological Society will start with the inestimable advantage of having as adviser in the project Professor E. L. Mark of Harvard, who for many years has been director of the Bermuda Biological Station for Research and from which the New York Aquarium has received many of its choicest specimens. In following out its other plans the Society will have the assistance of such ornithologists as Col. Thayer of Lancaster, of so distinguished an anatomist as Dr. Minot, of naturalists like Mr. Underwood, Dr. Smith, Mr. Thomas Barbour and many others.

ALEXANDER POPE, ESQ.

of aquatic life. In the center of each. and also in the great central rotunda are large pools for living specimens.

From each of the museums is entered the aquarium proper. Passing down the long, dimly lighted, vaulted central space are seen on either side brightly lighted pictures of marine life in all its ceaseless activity. Marine plants and animals of the North Atlantic, all named, described and of great interest to all persons living on our seashore; fauna from Southern waters, with its brightly colored, and strangely shaped specimens, all of the utmost interest to the student and the pleasure-seeker alike.

Whether the municipal authorities in creating an aquarium will follow Mr. Brown's sketch as representing the kind of aquarium Boston ought to have in operation by 1915 in all its

HON. NORMAN H WHITE