portant business. He made the journey in three weeks, a time so short that his statement was deemed almost incredible in Mr. Astor's office. One can only imagine, then, how great was the undertaking of a journey up the Missouri, across the plains, and through the mountains. From the start it was the policy of the academy to cultivate a museum. At that same second meeting when Koch offered to go zeuglodon-hunting, Mr. Chouteau generously offered to place the Bad Lands collection of fossils collected by Dr. F. V. Hayden—for that time a large and important collection—in the academy museum, donating his one-fourth interest in it to the society. Not long after he showed his cordial interest by "desiring the academy to name some naturalist to accompany him on his expedition to the upper Missouri this summer free of expense to the society." More than once afterward Mr. Chouteau took some naturalist or scientific man with him on similar expeditions into the far Northwest.
The old Western Academy of Science had done something toward securing property, and in 1856, at the meeting of August 4th, its library, collections, cases, and apparatus were transferred to the new society. A special meeting was held for receiving the transfer. Unfortunately, nothing of this donation remains to-day except the seal and the little book of old proceedings.
The academy was fortunate in having in its membership from the start men who were interested in science and able to conduct independent investigation. Shumard, Swallow, and Eads were professional scientists; Engelmann, Prout, and Wislizenus, while busy professional men, were original investigators in more than one field. From the very beginning of the society's history, the idea of work, rather than play or recreation, was present; not only was a museum to be gathered, but papers read at the meetings were to be printed. We find, accordingly, by the end of the third year of the academy's life, that two numbers of Volume I of their Transactions had been printed. These had been widely used in exchange, and more than one hundred and eighty societies in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Cuba, Chili, Asia, and Australia had entered into relations with the academy. The six volumes of the Transactions now in print are bulky tomes—the first containing 716 pages. That included many important papers. Geology naturally occupied a prominent place in a society where the Shumards, Swallow, and Prout were leading spirits, and in their publication many new species of fossils were described, and many papers regarding formations and the stratigraphical problems of Missouri, Kentucky, Kansas, and other Mississippi Valley and central States were presented. We have already stated that one quarter of the Hayden collection of Bad
