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 
