122 Trans. Acad. Sci. of St. Louis. 



and deposited in the Museum. ' ' Of the many and price- 

 less gifts of Mr. Chouteau only a section of the Fort 

 Pierre meteorite now remains, the balance having been 

 destroyed in the fire of 1869. 



Even the gloomy days of the Civil War added to the 

 Academy's museum. The Western Sanitary Commis- 

 sion deposited with the Academy what remained of the 

 natural history collection of McDowell College, which 

 had been confiscated and turned into a federal prison. 



At the close of the war the Academy regained some of 

 its accustomed activity, and, in the Fall of 1868, a com- 

 mittee was appointed to secure rooms in the Polytechnic 

 Building, as the museum and library had far outgrown 

 the quarters in Pope's College. While negotiations were 

 still pending, fire broke out in May, 1869, destroying al- 

 most the entire museum. Fortunately the library was 

 saved. The loss of the Academy museum was irrepar- 

 able and no efforts were made to re-establish it until a 

 few years ago. 



The palaeontological collections were perhaps the most 

 valuable part of the museum. They contained a large 

 number of teeth and bones of Mastodon giganteus and 

 Elephas primigenius, in good preservation, from Mis- 

 souri and other western states; a full skeleton of the 

 great cave bear from Europe ; a fine example of the head 

 of Bos bombifrons, an extinct fossil ox exhumed from 

 Chouteau's Pond. This fossil is so rare that only two 

 specimens had been discovered previously. The Acad- 

 emy's specimen withstood the fire and is in its present 

 museum. Through the liberality of Mr. Charles P. 

 Chouteau the Academy had obtained an extensive and 

 beautiful collection of fossils, collected by F. V. Hayden 

 in the Bad Lands of Nebraska, which had later been in- 

 creased by the purchase of the one-fourth interest owned 

 by Colonel A. J. Vaughan. This gave to the Academy 

 an equal share with the Academy of Natural Sciences of 

 Philadelphia in the splendid collection made by the 

 United States Geological Survey of the Territories from 



