The chief institution of learning is Washington University, which has fine new buildings in Forest Park on the western verge of the city, and cares for seventeen hundred students. The park system is very extensive, spreading partially around the built-up portions and embracing twenty-one hundred acres. The chief of these are the Forest Park, with fine trees and drives, the Tower Grove Park, Lafayette and Carondelet Parks, and in the northern suburbs O'Fallon Park, having adjacent the spacious Bellefontaine and Calvary Cemeteries. The gem of the system, however, is the Missouri Botanical Garden of seventy-five acres, the best of its kind in the country, which was bequeathed to the city by Henry Shaw, a native of Sheffield, England, who came to St. Louis, grew up with the city, and died there in 1889. The great attraction of St. Louis is its splendid bridge crossing the Mississippi, built by James B. Eads and completed in 1874 at a cost of $10,000,000, carrying a railway across, with a highway on the upper deck, being more than two thousand yards long, and resting on arches rising fifty-five feet above the water. The railway is tunnelled under the city for nearly a mile, and leads to the Union Station, which is one of the largest in the world. The Merchants' Bridge, which cost $3,000,000, brings another railway over, three miles above, and a third bridge is projected. The vast aggregation of railways centering at St. Louis also uses another bridge route north of the city, crossing the Missouri just above its mouth and then the Mississippi to Alton on the Illinois shore. The military post of St. Louis is Jefferson Barracks down the river, an important station of the United States army. [Illustration: Bridge Crossing the Mississippi at St. Louis] DESCENDING THE MISSISSIPPI.