THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE OF ST. LOUIS. 123 



arranged his medical practise as to permit his absence for about two 

 years, spent with Gray and in Europe — and a new president was of 

 necessity elected; but the office was well filled by Shumard, who 

 during this period was the leading investigator among the members. 

 Meetings were held regularly. The museum continued to grow, and 

 accessions to it to be reported. Occasional and for the most part good 

 papers were contributed to the transactions, thus furnishing means for 

 the increase of the library through exchanges, and Holmes presented 

 abstracts of the most important or interesting of the accessions. But 

 the raising of money for other than current purposes seems to have 

 been given up, and with the hard and trying times of the civil war 

 the border city of St. Louis could have been expected to concern itself 

 but little with science. And yet in the gloomy year of 1863 twenty- 

 two meetings were held, with an average attendance — ignoring two 

 meetings for which the number is not recorded — of eight members. 

 At these meetings letters were read from corresponding members, of 

 whom a goodly number of the distinguished men of the day had by 

 this time been elected, and from institutions with which relations had 

 been established; and exchange publications were laid on the table and 

 discussed. For some meetings nothing more is recorded, but a 

 knowledge of the men who were constant in their attendance makes it 

 certain that much unrecorded comment on the scientific work and 

 spirit of the times should be read between the lines of the journal. On 

 other occasions scientific communications or informal accounts of work 

 in hand were presented. In his report on that year's activity of 

 the academy, Engelmann justly takes pride in the collections and 

 library already acquired, the inauguration of the second volume of 

 transactions, and the fact that two hundred exchanging institutions 

 of science, in all civilized countries, were bidding God-speed to the 

 struggling St. Louis body. Only sixty active members, however, were 

 reported at this time, and the publication of transactions had placed 

 a per capita debt of about ten dollars on each of these. The testimony 

 of surviving members of this period is not needed to show that the life 

 of the academy then hung in the balance; but the men who were in- 

 terested in its existence were not the sort of men who let their efforts 

 come to naught, and it would have been more surprising if it had died 

 than that it lived. The war came to an end, the country, freed from 

 the great strain it had been subjected to, prospered, new members 

 came to replace those who had died or removed, and the academy con- 

 tinued to exist. 



In retrospect, we are often tempted to wonder what would have 

 come about if some particular thing had or had not happened; and 

 the temptation is present here. The thing that did happen at this 

 point in the history of the academy was a disastrous fire which de- 

 stroyed that part of the medical building in which the academy met, 



