ACADEMY OF NATURAL SCIENCE OF ST. LOUIS. 631 



portant business. He made the journey in three weeks, a time 

 so short that his statement was deemed almost incredible in Mr. 

 Astor's office. One can only imagine, then, how great was the 

 undertaking of a journey up the Missouri, across the plains, and 

 through the mountains. From the start it was the policy of the 

 academy to cultivate a museum. At that same second meeting 

 when Koch offered to go zeuglodon-hunting, Mr. Chouteau gen- 

 erously offered to place the Bad Lands collection of fossils collected 

 by Dr. F. V. Hayden — for that time a large and important collection 

 — in the academy museum, donating his one-fourth interest in it to 

 the society. JSfot long after he showed his cordial interest by " desir- 

 ing the academy to name some naturalist to accompany him on his 

 expedition to the upper Missouri this summer free of expense to the 

 society." More than once afterward Mr. Chouteau took some 

 naturalist or scientific man with him on similar expeditions into the 

 far Northwest. 



The old Western Academy of Science had done something to- 

 ward securing property, and in 1856, at the meeting of August 4th, 

 its library, collections, cases, and apparatus were transferred to the 

 new society. A special meeting was held for receiving the transfer. 

 Unfortunately, nothing of this donation remains to-day except the 

 seal and the little book of old proceedings. 



The academy was fortunate in having in its membership from the 

 start men who were interested in science and able to conduct inde- 

 pendent investigation. Shumard, Swallow, and Eads were profes- 

 sional scientists ; Engelmann, Prout, and Wislizenus, while busy pro- 

 fessional men, were original investigators in more than one field. 

 From the very beginning of the society's history, the idea of work, 

 rather than play or recreation, was present; not only was a museum 

 to be gathered, but papers read at the meetings were to be printed. 

 We find, accordingly, by the end of the third year of the academy's 

 life, that two numbers of Volume I of their Transactions had been 

 printed. These had been widely used in exchange, and more than 

 one hundred and eighty societies in the United States, Canada, 

 Mexico, Cuba, Chili, Asia, and Australia had entered into rela- 

 tions with the academy. The six volumes of the Transactions now 

 in print are bulky tomes — the first containing 716 pages. That 

 included many important papers. Geology naturally occupied a 

 prominent place in a society where the Shumards, Swallow, and Prout 

 were leading spirits, and in their publication many new species of 

 fossils were described, and many papers regarding formations and the 

 stratigraphical problems of Missouri, Kentucky, Kansas, and other 

 Mississippi Valley and central States were presented. We have 

 already stated that one quarter of the Hayden collection of Bad 



