118 MISSOURI BOTANICAL GARDEN BULLETIN 
of his life. They were wife and children to him. For 
them he watched and worked, and to them and their present 
and future interests he consecrated all the energies of body 
and mind until he could watch and work no more. The 
Garden and the Park could not be what they are now, could 
not be what they surely will be hereafter, if the man who 
planned and perpetuated them had scattered his compara- 
tively limited means among the multitude of applicants. 
He refused to be generous to some so that he might be more 
than generous to all. 
The following anecdote may be related here: Some years 
ago Mr. Shaw was escorting a lady visitor through the Gar- 
den, and pointing out to her the various rare plants and 
flowers he knew so well and watched so fondly. She said 
to him: ‘‘I cannot understand, sir, how you are able to re 
member all these different and difficult names,”’ ‘*Madam,’’ 
he replied with a courtly bow, ‘‘did you ever know a mother 
who could forget the names of her children? These plants 
and flowers are my children. How can I forget them?’’ 
On a certain occasion when a bottle of choice Medoe was 
upon the table, Mr. Shaw—diluting his glass—remarked with 
a smile: ‘‘I learned to take my wine with a little water from 
Montaigne.”’ 
He was a great lover of the wise and witty old Gascon 
(from whose fountain so many writers have drawn their 
wit and wisdom without acknowledging the debt) and learned 
from him much more important things than the dilution of 
his wine. ‘‘He was, I think,’’ says a close observer of him, 
“fof the same bent of mind so far as life is concerned.”’ 
Emerson, in his ‘‘Representative Men,’’ takes Montaigne as 
a typical sceptie, not so much in religion—for, whatever may 
have been his private opinions, publicly he lived and died 
a Catholic—but in his general views of life. The device 
upon his seal was a pair of scales and the motto beneath, 
in old French: ‘‘What do I know?’’ Mr. Shaw might have 
adopted the same device and motto, for he certainly was 
governed in large measure by the principle they set forth. 
He took as little as possible upon trust, and as far as pos- 
sible tested everything and everybody before giving his 
faith and confidence. He believed fully in men and things 
