Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 62.djvu/217

Rh this was formally transferred to them by Dr. Engelmann, together with the library of his father, which, however, had actually been placed at the garden and in part arranged before the death of Mr. Shaw. One of Dr. Engelmann 's biographers expressed the great surprise occasioned by the vast amount of work that he, a busy physician, had found time to do. The number and minute accuracy of his unpublished notes, which form part of this gift from his son, were even more surprising. Over 20,000 of them exist, varying in character from a mere memorandum of the appearance of a plant which he had observed in a foreign garden, or a simple bibliographic reference, to accurate detail sketches of all of the specimens on which his conception of a species in a difficult group rested; and the sixty thick volumes in which they are now contained are counted among the choicest possessions of the institution.

It was but a few years after the organization of the garden under its present management that the Director one morning received a letter from the late Dr. E. Lewis Sturtevant, a correspondent for many years, but one whom he never had the privilege of meeting personally, asking if the garden would accept a large collection of specimens, reference cards, sketches, partly in watercolors, and other material illustrative of the genus Capsicum, with a view to its ultimate utilization in the preparation of an illustrated monograph such as the donor had for years had in contemplation for his own pen, but which he then saw that he must place in other hands. The gift was accepted, and the resulting publication, which has been referred to above, is now a matter of history and, I am pleased to say, met with Dr. Sturtevant 's approval. Some years later, stricken with mortal illness, Dr. Sturtevant once more wrote to ask if the garden would accept as a gift the large and important collection of pre-Linnean books that it had been his pleasure to accumulate through the years of his active study of the origin and modifications of the plants cultivated by man, adding that he wished to attach no conditions to the gift if it would be