guidelines for the composition and responsibilities of standing commit- 
tees; outlined procedures for the library, museum, and publications; 
and stated when regular meetings should be held and what agenda 
categories should be.’ 
The founders of the Academy of Science of St. Louis were accom- 
plished individuals. George Engelmann, the group’s first president, was 
its best-educated and most enthusiastic supporter. Engelmann acquired 
his interest in science as a youth growing up in Frankfurt, Germany. 
His father, an ordained minister and head of a school for girls, was 
also something of a savant who took George with him to the meetings 
of Frankfurt’s Sekenberg Society of Natural History. 
Engelmann’s father wanted him to follow family tradition and enter 
the clergy, but the young man decided to study medicine instead. 
Engelmann made this choice largely in order to obtain a good educa- 
tion in science. He started his studies at the University of Heidelberg 
but was expelled for expounding liberal radical views. After Heidelberg, 
he attended the University of Berlin and later the University of Wurz- 
burg. He received his M.D. from Wurzburg in 1831 at the age of twenty- 
two. Interestingly, his thesis was in botany instead of medicine. It con- 
cerned abnormalities in the formation of blossoms. 
After receiving his M.D., Engelmann spent several years at the 
University of Paris studying natural history in the company of Alex- 
ander Braun and Louis Agassiz, both of whom he had met during his 
stay at Heidelberg. Leaving Paris, he came to America in 1834 to set- 
tle some business matters for several uncles who had invested in pro- 
perty near Belleville, Illinois. 
The young physician thrilled at the prospect of living so near the 
American West, a land virtually unknown to botanists. After landing 
in Baltimore, Engelmann immediately left for Philadelphia where he 
met with the botanist/ornithologist Thomas Nuttall at that city’s Academy 
of Sciences. Nuttall was one of the few natural scientists who had traveled 
extensively in the Mississippi River Valley, and Engelmann was eager 
to find out what he had learned of the region’s flora. 
After coming to Illinois, Engelmann put his eagerness to study and 
collect aside for a time in order to make a few dollars practicing 
medicine. He began as soon as he could—in 1834 and again in 1837 
he made extended trips through Arkansas, Louisiana, and Missouri. 
He chronicled these journeys in the journal Das Westland, a periodical 
written in St. Louis and printed in Germany that encouraged German 
immigration to the St. Louis area. 
Engelmann’s trip in 1837 was not to be his last excursion through 
the untamed, romantic lands west of the Mississippi, although it would 
be several years before he went again. Later in life he visited Colorado, 
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