20 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN. 
In response to toasts proposed by the chairman, short 
and apt speeches were made by Mr. O. C. Simonds, of 
Chicago, President of the American Association of Ceme- 
tery Superintendents, Professor J. C. Whitten, of the Uni- 
versity of Missouri, President F. W. Brockman of the St. 
Louis School Board, and Messrs. Leonard Matthews, Julius 
Koenig, and Julius Pitzman, of St. Louis. 
The award of flower premiums for 1894 was again in- 
trusted to the Florists’ Club of St. Louis, for the benefit 
of a chrysanthemum show held in the Exposition Building, 
St. Louis, November 6 to 9. Some of the premiums were 
not competed for, and were consequently not awarded, and 
the exhibition judges decided that none of the plants com- 
peting for the gold medal founded in 1893 were sufiiciently 
meritorious to justify the award of the medal. 
The object of Mr. Shaw in providing for ‘* premiums or 
prizes to a flower show or exhibition * * * established 
by amateurs and horticulturists of St. Louis,’’ evidently 
was to stimulate public interest in floriculture, to improve 
and increase the variety of plants used in St. Louis, and to 
stimulate and assist florists in their efforts to create and 
supply a demand for decorative plants. In approving the 
suggestions of the Florists’ Club for a list of the Shaw 
premiums each year, an effort has therefore been made so 
to shape the list as to add to the general attractiveness of 
the exhibition and at the same time also to familiarize the 
public with new or easily cultivated plants not usually to be 
seen in the local florists’ windows. It was in the hope of 
bringing to these St. Louis exhibitions newly introduced 
plants, as well as to stimulate the importation of such 
plants, that in 1893 the Board of Trustees of the Garden 
founded ‘‘ the Henry Shaw Medal for the introduction of a 
valuable plant,’’ open to competition in any line of decora- 
tive horticulture, but to be awarded only ‘ for a plant of 
decided merit for cultivation, not previously an article of 
North American commerce, and introduced to such com- 
merce by the exhibitor during the year in which said award 
