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special needs. And eventually they began to take on more and more outside 

 orders as well. In 1896, for the first time, the MBL reportedly shipped about 

 $125 worth of specimens to Williams College to inaugurate the winter sales, 

 which escalated thereafter. 



Under Lillie's directorship, the MBL entered into business with the 

 General Biological Supply House. In 1913 a graduate student at the Univer- 

 sity of Chicago, where Lillie headed the program, saw a biological market 

 and began to fill it. Morris Wells first mailed out forms to biology teachers 

 the next year. He processed his few orders in his parents' basement, 

 provided earthworms or frogs or fetal pigs and brains from Chicago 

 slaughterhouses, for example. Then with a Ph.D. and eventually an assistant 

 professorship at Chicago, he expanded his business. In 1918 he incorpo- 

 rated, wdth the help of Lillie's father-in-law, Charles R. Crane, who then 

 bought 51 percent of the stock. Crane presented this stock as a gift worth 

 $18,000 to the MBL. The stock value kept expanding so that forty years later 



"Colonel" Walmsley and his nets. MBL Archives. 



