Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/202

196 visited by thousands of people each year, and the contents of the small and miscellaneous museum attracted them, this was the only request for access to the herbarium or library that. had been made by a botanist for years.

From time to time he turned his thoughts toward the fuller realization of his plans, apparently hesitating between leaving their inception to the trustees that he had provided for appointing by will, and making the beginning himself either alone or in conjunction with trustees—a possibility specifically provided for in the enabling act of the legislature. On the occasion of my first visit to him, in the early spring of 1885, he pointed out to me the place, on Flora Avenue, before the main gate of the garden, where he had seriously thought of building lecture rooms, laboratories and residences for a faculty of botany. It was somewhat earlier than this that he called the great botanist, Asa Gray, into his counsels, and largely because of the wise advice of Dr. Gray, who saw that the time was not yet come in St. Louis for an institution such as was contemplated, he decided to let its growth be a normal one from small beginnings—but without in the least modifying his provisions for the final attainment of the largest results he had ever contemplated. Amid the beautiful surroundings of his country home, though also maintaining a city house, Mr. Shaw passed the latter half of a very long life—always coming back to the reconsideration of the coming development of his plans, modifying them in details, but never altering their original breadth as shown in the act that had been passed so many years before. To the garden he welcomed all who cared to visit it, and himself dictated the position of nearly every tree or smaller plant set out.

It was apparently the death of Engelmann, a resident of St. Louis and one of the greatest as perhaps the most accurately painstaking of American botanists, that caused the next step forward to be taken. Shortly after this, in 1884-5, Dr. Gray was once more, and this time rather urgently, called into consultation, that the city in which the plans were laid might not be entirely without a botanist; and the result was that in the spring of 1885 Mr. Shaw proposed to the directors of Washington University to endow in that institution a school of botany, with the understanding that by testamentary provision the best uses of his garden for scientific study and investigation should be ensured to its professor and students. The offer being accepted, the Henry Shaw School of Botany was formally inaugurated on the sixth of November following, and its single professor was thrown into a pleasant and frequent personal intercourse with Mr. Shaw which lasted until the death of the latter. About this time, suggestions were not lacking, from men of judgment, that by rendering the union