Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/129

Rh scientific library, especially rich, naturally, in the publications of organizations having objects similar to its own. Most of these exchanges have been received without interruption, and prove invaluable to investigators who desire to go into the earlier literature of their subjects. At the end of 1903, 569 exchanging institutions were reported by the librarian, and the library contained 14,491 books and 11,017 pamphlets. Unfortunately, lack of room has caused these to be rather difficult of access for some years past, and the index, started many years ago by Dr. Baumgarten, has fallen into arrears. The latter fault, however, is in process of correction, and it is believed that the library will be more usable and more used in the future than has been the case heretofore.

In the homeless state in which the academy has passed the last third of a century, little inducement has been found for the accumulation of museum material that could not be displayed and could scarcely be housed. Some things, however, there are, which will form a nucleus for the museum of the future, for while the activity of the academy has been concentrated of late on holding meetings and publishing its transactions, the original inclusion of a museum among its prominent objects has been neither forgotten nor discarded. Among the present collections are a dozen or so of good fossiliferous slabs from various formations, some of them of unique value; a few remnants of the Hayden collection saved from the fire, containing among other things the type of Tetanotherium Prouti; a good specimen of Bos cavifrons; some ten thousand paleontological specimens brought together by Yandell, containing his own types and those of many of the species described by Shumard, whose own poorly preserved collection, of about the same size, is owned by Washington University; several hundred specimens of pottery from the mounds of southern Missouri, on which is based a quarto publication by Evers, issued by the academy some years since; two or three dozen human crania from the same district, the measurements of which have proved so divergent from those of skulls of comparable periods that those to whom their study was entrusted have never ventured on a description of them; several dozen meteorite specimens, of which the most important is one originally weighing about 35 pounds, which is described and figured in the first volume of the academy's transactions; and a collection of over 600 butterflies, beautifully mounted on Denton tablets, was presented to the academy a few years ago by subscription, through the efforts of Mrs. W. L. Bouton.

It may seem to have been by chance, but I think it appears from what has already been said that it was not, that the early existence of the academy was closely associated with the St. Louis Medical College, and that leading members of the faculty of that institution have always been among its active members. Too much credit can not be given to