196 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



visited by thousands of people each year, and the contents of the small 

 and miscellaneous museum attracted them, this was the only request 

 for access to the herbarium or library that. had been made by a botanist 

 for years. 



From time to time he turned his thoughts toward the fuller realiza- 

 tion of his plans, apparently hesitating between leaving their inception 

 to the trustees that he had provided for appointing by will, and making 

 the beginning himself either alone or in conjunction with trustees 

 a possibility specifically provided for in the enabling act of the legisla- 

 ture. On the occasion of my first visit to him, in the early spring of 

 1885, he pointed out to me the place, on Flora Avenue, before the main 

 gate of the garden, where he had seriously thought of building lecture 

 rooms, laboratories and residences for a faculty of botany. It was 

 somewhat earlier than this that he called the great botanist, Asa Gray, 

 into his counsels, and largely because of the wise advice of Dr. Gray, 

 who saw that the time was not yet come in St. Louis for an institution 

 such as was contemplated, he decided to let its growth be a normal 

 one from small beginnings but without in the least modifying his 

 provisions for the final attainment of the largest results he had ever 

 contemplated. Amid the beautiful surroundings of his country home, 

 though also maintaining a city house, Mr. Shaw passed the latter half 

 of a very long life always coining back to the reconsideration of the 

 coming development of his plans, modifying them in details, but never 

 altering their original breadth as shown in the act that had been passed 

 so many years before. To the garden he welcomed all who cared to 

 visit it, and himself dictated the position of nearly every tree or 

 smaller plant set out. 



It was apparently the death of Engelmann, a resident of St. Louis 

 and one of the greatest as perhaps the most accurately painstaking of 

 American botanists, that caused the next step forward to be taken. 

 Shortly after this, in 1884-5, Dr. Gray was once more, and this time 

 rather urgently, called into consultation, that the city in which the 

 plans were laid might not be entirely without a botanist; and the 

 result was that in the spring of 1885 Mr. Shaw proposed to the directors 

 of Washington University to endow in that institution a school of 

 botany, with the understanding that by testamentary provision the 

 best uses of his garden for scientific study and investigation should 

 be ensured to its professor and students. The offer being accepted, 

 the Henry Shaw School of Botany was formally inaugurated on the 

 sixth of November following, and its single professor was thrown into 

 a pleasant and frequent personal intercourse with Mr. Shaw which 

 lasted until the death of the latter. About this time, suggestions were 

 not lacking, from men of judgment, that by rendering the union be- 



