424 



PIONEERS OF SCIENCE IN AMERICA. 



college would cause a fireproof building to be erected for their 

 reception, I would deposit them therein, at least for a term 

 of years, and with the hope, through arrangements afterward 

 to be made, of leaving them with the college as a permanent 

 possession. Such a building was provided in the Woods Cab- 

 inet ; and, more recently, the conditions for the purchase of 

 the collections have been agreed upon." When he wrote the 

 above he was engaged in the more perfect cataloguing and 

 arranging of the three collections. 



When Walker Hall was built, the mineralogical cabinet 

 was removed to rooms in that building, and was destroyed 

 when the building was burned, in March, 1882. Although few 

 could be classed as combustibles, a diligent search in the de- 

 bris of the building revealed scarcely a trace of the specimens. 

 This was a sad loss. Prof. Shepard valued the collection at 

 seventy-five thousand dollars, and the college had actually 

 paid forty thousand dollars for it. There was only fifteen 

 thousand dollars of insurance on the whole contents of the 

 building. 



Dr. Shepard held his professorship at Charleston uninter- 

 ruptedly until the civil war, and immediately after it closed 

 he went back, at the urgent invitation of his former col- 

 leagues, and resumed his lectures. In 1869 he retired from the 

 full discharge of his duties, but continued to give some lec- 

 tures until shortly before his death. While in Charleston he 

 discovered rich deposits of phosphate of lime in the immediate 

 vicinity of that city. Their great value in agriculture and sub- 

 sequent use in the manufacture of superphosphate fertilizers 

 proved an important addition to the chemical industries of 

 South Carolina. 



The collection that was burned in 1882 was the finest in 

 the United States, and was surpassed abroad only by that in 

 the British Museum. But Dr. Shepard's collecting had not 

 stopped with its formation, and he succeeded before his death 

 in gathering a second cabinet of meteorites and minerals 

 which ranked among the very largest private collections. 

 This he kept in a fireproof cabinet at his private residence in 

 New Haven. 



The influence of his early home culture was clearly marked 

 in Prof. Shepard. To such a degree was he distinguished in 

 all the characteristics of a gentleman that he was called upon 



