"The idea of an out-of-door laboratory was conceived in response to the need, in the study of ecology, of bringing together the observations made in y carried out in a glass laboratory and observations made in the open. This required a laboratory with situations which would make available the plant associations of the surrounding territory and their transitions, and in which further studies could be made upon the plant members and the environmental factors. Such an out-of-door laboratory affords a place in which the results of the in-door laboratory can be checked, by experiment, against those prevailing under natural conditions. … President and the Board of Trustees of accepted this idea and granted to the Department of Botany,in 1920, the use of some four acres of land for this project. … It has since become popularly known to the students as the Dutchess County Ecological Laboratory."