12 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 



In September, 1840, Mr. Shaw made his first visit to Eu- 

 rope, stopping on the way at Eochester, N. Y., where his 

 parents and sisters resided. The youngest sister, now Mrs. 

 Morisse, accompanied him to England, from whence, after 

 a lengthy stay among relatives and friends, he proceeded 

 alone to the Continent for an extended tour. Eeturning to 

 St. Louis in the autumn of 1842, he arranged his affairs for 

 another absence in Europe which lasted about three years ; 

 during which time he visited all the then accessible Euro- 

 pean localities, together with Constantinople and Egypt. A 

 contemplated journey to Palestine was arrested by the prev- 

 alence of the plague. The journals kept and letters writ- 

 ten in the course of these two absences abroad show, what 

 might have been expected, that Mr. Shaw did not travel 

 merely for the sake of traveling, but to see and hear what 

 was most worth seeing and hearing; or, in other words, to 

 acquire that invaluable education which only such intelligent 

 and observing travel can afford. The broad, comprehensive, 

 impartial views of men and things with which he thus sup- 

 plemented the knowledge drawn from books and from per- 

 sonal experience, may be regarded as completing the culture 

 of his maturer life. Thenceforth he was, in the best sense of 

 the phrase, a man of the world; a cosmopolitan rather — 

 who though living by preference in America, could have 

 been equally at home in any other civilized country. 



Early in 1851 Mr. Shaw went abroad for the last time, 

 drawn thither by the first World's Fair, then being held in 

 London. This final visit has a special and peculiar interest 

 to us from the fact that out of it grew, indirectly, the Mis- 

 souri Botanical Garden and Tower Grove Park. According 

 to his own statement, it was while walkinjr throuf^h the 

 grounds of Chatsworth — the most magnificent private resi- 

 dence in Europe — that the fruitful idea first dawned upon 

 him. He said to himself: *' Why may I not have a garden 

 too? I have enough land and money for something of the 

 same sort in a smaller way." That idea could not have had 

 a more lovely or more appropriate birthplace than the spot 



