Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/127

Rh arranged his medical practise as to permit his absence for about two years, spent with Gray and in Europe—and a new president was of necessity elected; but the office was well filled by Shumard, who during this period was the leading investigator among the members. Meetings were held regularly. The museum continued to grow, and accessions to it to be reported. Occasional and for the most part good papers were contributed to the transactions, thus furnishing means for the increase of the library through exchanges, and Holmes presented abstracts of the most important or interesting of the accessions. But the raising of money for other than current purposes seems to have been given up, and with the hard and trying times of the civil war the border city of St. Louis could have been expected to concern itself but little with science. And yet in the gloomy year of 1863 twenty-two meetings were held, with an average attendance—ignoring two meetings for which the number is not recorded—of eight members. At these meetings letters were read from corresponding members, of whom a goodly number of the distinguished men of the day had by this time been elected, and from institutions with which relations had been established; and exchange publications were laid on the table and discussed. For some meetings nothing more is recorded, but a knowledge of the men who were constant in their attendance makes it certain that much unrecorded comment on the scientific work and spirit of the times should be read between the lines of the journal. On other occasions scientific communications or informal accounts of work in hand were presented. In his report on that year's activity of the academy, Engelmann justly takes pride in the collections and library already acquired, the inauguration of the second volume of transactions, and the fact that two hundred exchanging institutions of science, in all civilized countries, were bidding God-speed to the struggling St. Louis body. Only sixty active members, however, were reported at this time, and the publication of transactions had placed a per capita debt of about ten dollars on each of these. The testimony of surviving members of this period is not needed to show that the life of the academy then hung in the balance; but the men who were interested in its existence were not the sort of men who let their efforts come to naught, and it would have been more surprising if it had died than that it lived. The war came to an end, the country, freed from the great strain it had been subjected to, prospered, new members came to replace those who had died or removed, and the academy continued to exist.

In retrospect, we are often tempted to wonder what would have come about if some particular thing had or had not happened; and the temptation is present here. The thing that did happen at this point in the history of the academy was a disastrous fire which destroyed that part of the medical building in which the academy met,