112 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
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 walking through 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 
upon which the herditary chiefs of the great house of 
Devonshire have for nearly three hundred years lavished 
all the resources of ample wealth and cultivated taste; the 
historic domain which William the Conqueror gave to his 
natural son, William Peveril; which Sir William Cavendish 
bought, and began to improve, in the reign of Elizabeth ; 
which for thirteen years was the prison of Elizabeth’s cousin 
and enemy, Mary, Queen of Scots; which before and since 
