Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/566

552 collections; his geological cabinet was also important, being especially remarkable for fossil remains. The meteoric collection, begun in 1828, he stated to be the fourth in extent and value known at the time of writing.

As to the transfer of the combined cabinets to Amherst College Prof. Shepard continues:

"The removal of these collections from New Haven to Amherst, in 1847, was the result of an understanding entered into between President Hitchcock and myself, that if the 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 Cabinet; and, more recently, the conditions for the purchase of the collection 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 débris 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 uninterruptedly until the civil war, and immediately after it closed he went back, at the urgent invitation of his former colleagues, and resumed his lectures. In 1869 he retired from the full discharge of his duties, but continued to give some lectures 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 subsequent 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 meteorolites and minerals which ranked among the very largest private collections. This he kept in a fireproof cabinet at his private residence in New Haven.

Prof. Shepard died, after a short illness, at Charleston, May 1, 1886.