MEMOIRS OF DECEASED FELLOWS 245 



don, and sell them to the British Museum, the School of Mines, or wherever 

 a buyer could be found. 



He was not long in finding out that British fossils and minerals were also 

 salable in Paris, and forthwith he tapped the mining regions of Cornwall 

 and Cumberland. Often he returned to Paris with quite a large sum of 

 money in his pocket, sometimes amounting, he slyly says, to as much as 

 $40. . . . 



At Epernay, sixty miles east of Paris, good Madame Cliquot had a large 

 vineyard which produced the very fine brand of champagne, bearing her 

 name. Certain strata of the Paris Basin, of the oldest Eocene age, cropped 

 out with very fine sections on the estate of Madame Cliquot, and brought 

 to light certain fossils that were then little known, and valuable. If Pro- 

 fessor Ward ever sets up a new -coat of arms for his posterity, surely it 

 should contain somewhere the figure of a long, trumpet-shaped shell of the 

 genus Cerithium, on a carpet-bag, couchant. 



Thanks to the conciliating diplomacy that every collector must possess 

 to be successful, and to the good nature of Madame and her manager, the 

 young American who spoke such excellent French was given a cinch on 

 the fossils underlying a portion of that estate, and told to work his will. 

 He hired workmen at forty cents a day, and for several summers he mined 

 and countermined his concession so successfully that many score of those 

 curious fossils now repose in British and continental museums, each hav- 

 ing yielded a benefit to the purveyor of from $5 to $10. Nature kindly 

 made them just small enough to pack successfully in a trunk, and also 

 light enough to carry in a satchel when necessary. 



Notwithstanding the noise it makes, Europe is a small country; and in 

 a very short time Ward had extended his field of commercial activity over 

 the whole of it. 'I never traveled third class when I could go fourth,' 

 said the man of many trips, 'but I went all over Europe, selling specimens 

 to museums, and collecting to sell elsewhere. I went to Brussels, Hamburg, 

 Copenhagen, Berlin and Vienna repeatedly, and finally covered Sweden, 

 Russia and Spain. . . .' 



Thus was developed the germ of Ward's Natural Science Establishment. 

 The history of that strange and unique institution really dates back to the 

 Paris Basin and the Cerithium quarry in the vineyard of Madame Cliquot. 

 The making of the great Ward cabinet of minerals, and its purchase for 

 $20,000 by means of a popular subscription for the University of Rochester, 

 is merely an important incident in the development of the idea.* A still 



• At the time the Ward Collections came into the possession of the University of 

 Rochester, and were displayed on the top floor of Anderson Hall, occupying ten rooms, 

 a pamphlet of 44 pages was printed describing the collections. In this Professor Ward 

 says, that after collecting from American localities he had "spent six years in Europe, 

 studying in the large museums, and travelling ver.y widely through that continent and 

 into Asia and Africa, in executing the detail of a plan which he had formed for a large 

 Mineralogical and Geological Museum. ... I have collected them, almost from the 

 first, upon a plan which was strictly an educational one, and which contemplated a full 

 and equal illustration of these sciences. ..." 



