Barnum’s next step was to interview John Heath, the administrator of the Scudder estate, and make him an offer for the Museum collection in the name of Mr. Olmsted. Twelve thousand dollars was agreed upon as the price, and Barnum was to take possession of the American Museum on November 15, 1841. A day was appointed to draw up the agreements with Mr. Olmsted, and on that day Heath appeared and informed Barnum that he must decline his offer, since he had meanwhile sold the collection to the New York Museum Company for $15,000 and had accepted an advance payment of $1,000. Barnum appealed to Heath’s honor, but Heath replied that he had not put it in writing, and that he was obliged to do the best he could for Scudder’s orphan daughters. Mr. Olmsted was perfectly satisfied with the new arrangements, for he would now have a permanent tenant for his Museum building, and Barnum was disregarded and forgotten. But he was not inactive. He gathered information about the company known as the New York Museum Company. The chairman of the board of directors, he learned, was the ex-president of an unsuccessful bank, and the other directors were stock speculators. Barnum discovered that their scheme was to purchase the American Museum, join it to Peale’s Museum, which the chairman of the board of directors of the New York Museum Company already owned, and to issue stock to the public to the amount of $50,000. Then the directors planned to appropriate $30,000 and allow the stockholders to take care of themselves on the principle of _caveat emptor_. Barnum visited his newspaper friends, Moses Y. Beach, Major M. M. Noah, and several other newspaper owners. He told them his troubles and explained the plans of the New York Museum Company. He asked for the use of their columns “to blow that speculation sky-high,” and they agreed with him that it was a public duty as well as a personal favor. Barnum wrote daily editorial notes for almost every newspaper in New York warning the public not to buy stock in the New York Museum Company. He described the board of directors as broken-down bank directors engaged in the exhibition of stuffed monkey and gander skins, and he cited the instance of the Zoölogical Institute, which had failed because of just such a financial plan as that proposed by the New York Museum Company. He branded the Peale speculation as more fantastic than Dickens’s “Grand United Metropolitan Hot Muffin and Crumpet-Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.”