Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 52.djvu/660

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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

ceive free tuition, rent, and board; their appointment is by competitive examination. Prof. William Trelease is the director of the Missouri Botanical Garden, and has an able corps of scientific and office assistants and gardeners.

An important part of Mr. Shaw's plan was the establishment of a school of botany, the head of which was to hold the George Engelmann professorship. This school is organized in connection with Washington University; it is closely related to the Missouri Botanical Garden, the directorship of which is also held by the occupant of the chair. In the work of the school Professor Trelease has three assistants; seventeen different courses of instruction are offered by them. Under the direction of the school there are also offered at the garden important courses in elementary botany for children or for busy people.

Washington University is in close touch with the Academy of Science. From its faculty come some of the academy's most active workers and officers. Professors Woodward (mathematics and mechanics), Nipher (physics), Engler (mathematics), Pritchett (astronomy), Trelease (botany), and Hambach (geology) have been conspicuous in its work. To the Transactions of later years they have contributed numerous and important papers. At a time when the academy had no other home, the doors of the university were opened to it for its meetings and the housing of its library and the storing of its collection. The academy is fortunate, indeed, in having been so closely in sympathy with an institution of learning the interest of whose teaching force more than aught else kept it active during a critical period of its history.

Among the most active members who came to recruit the force, which we have seen above from Dr. Engelmann's statement had been somewhat reduced by time, was that master worker in entomology, Dr. Charles Valentine Riley. Born in London, England, on September 18, 1843, he was schooled at Chelsea and Bayswater, at Dieppe, France, and at Bonn, Germany. In 1860 he came to this country, settling upon a farm in Illinois. Removing to Chicago, he began editorial work upon the Evening Journal and the Prairie Farmer. Near the close of the war, May, 1864, he joined the 134th Illinois Volunteers. When the war ended he resumed his editorial labors on the Prairie Farmer. In 1868 he was appointed State Entomologist of Missouri, a position which he ably filled until 1877, when he was made chief of the commission appointed by the United States Government to investigate the ravages and life history of the Rocky Mountain locust. The greater part of the reports of this commission was written by him. In 1881, when the commission was merged into the work of the Agricultural Department, Dr.