108 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
Sarah Shaw, in Rochester, New York, at the age of 86, and 
Mrs. Caroline Morisse, in St. Louis, at the age of 84. The 
father was a manufacturer of grates, fire-irons, ete., and 
had a large establishment in Green Lane, Sheffield, which 
was afterwards removed to Roseoe Place; both of which 
sites have long since disappeared before the advancing tide 
of brick and mortar. Probably the earliest recollections of 
the boy were associated with the factory and warehouse, but 
he showed no tendency to tread in the paternal footsteps in 
that respect ; though the business habits and methods he was 
thus brought in contact with at the period when the mind is 
‘‘wax to receive and marble to retain,’’ were of inestimable 
service to him at a later day. 
His primary education was obtained at Thorne, a vil- 
lage not far from his native town; and his favorite place 
for study, we are told, was an arbor, half-hidden by blos- 
soming vines and surrounded by trees and flowers. He 
seems to have been a lover of these from childhood, and 
with his two sisters passed many happy hours in the little 
garden attached to the family residence; ‘‘planting and 
cultivating anemones and ranunculus,’’ as he remembered 
and told after the lapse of nearly eighty years. 
From Thorne he was transferred to Mill Hill, about twenty 
miles from London. It was what is termed in England a 
‘‘Dissenting’’ school, the elder Shaw being a Baptist; but 
was considered among the best private institutions of learn- 
ing in the Kingdom. Here he remained some six years, 
leaving probably in 1817; and here he finished that part 
of his education which schools could give—the education 
that taught him how to educate himself in the long and busy 
life upon which he was soon to enter. Mill Hill gave him 
an average knowledge of the classics, less of Greek than of 
Latin; and more than an average knowledge of mathemat- 
ies, which he developed by subsequent study, for the mere 
love of the science apparently. He was for a long time re- 
garded as the best mathematician in St. Louis. At both 
schools he was taught French, and became in later years an 
excellent French scholar; speaking, reading and writing it 
with as much ease and correctness as English. He was 
