Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/276

264 are his various papers upon the 'American Oaks' and the Coniferæ, published in 'Transactions of the St. Louis Academy' and elsewhere, the results of Ions-continued and most conscientious study. The same must be said of his persevering study of the North American vines, of which he at length recognized and characterized a dozen species—excellent subjects for his nice discrimination, and now becoming of no small importance to grape-growers, both in this country and in Europe. Nearly all that we know scientifically of our species and forms of Vitis is directly due to Dr. Engelmann's investigations." The list of his papers published in "Coulter's Botanical Gazette" for May, 1884, which is not quite complete, contains about a hundred entries.

Dr. Engelmann made several journeys of considerable length in the interest of science, or for geographical observation. Two of them were to the Rocky Mountains and Colorado, and New Mexico; a longer tour was to the Appalachian Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina; and a third, in 1880, to the Pacific coast and Oregon, where "he saw for the first time in their native home the plants described thirty years previous."

Dr. Engelmann's meteorological observations constitute another important feature of his scientific work. They were begun as soon as he had established himself in St. Louis, and were kept up unintermittingly from New-Year's-day of 1836, to February 2, 1884—two days before his death—or during a period of forty-eight years. He visited his instruments regularly and systematically, every morning at seven o'clock, at noon, and at nine o'clock in the evening; and "even in the last week he was seen sweeping a path through the snow in his garden to reach his maximum and minimum thermometers." His last publication was a digest of the thermometrical part of these observations. In offering this paper to the St. Louis Academy of Sciences at nearly the last meeting of that body which he attended, he apologized for not waiting till the half-century had been completed before presenting his results, saying that they could not be appreciably different after two or three years more. He had been endeavoring to discover some law governing the weather, but had failed to do so. A member of the Academy expressed the hope that the half-century would be completed. Dr. Engelmann replied that he had some misgivings on the subject.

Dr. Engelmann was known, through his life in St. Louis, as a public-spirited citizen, who always had the interests of the town unselfishly at heart. He also showed a practical interest in the efforts of the European peoples to gain their freedom; and, when the revolutions broke out in 1848, he became the head of an organization which was formed at St. Louis to assist them. He took part, in 1836, in the organization of the "Western Academy of Science," which, coming before the times were ripe for such an organization, had only a short