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care of the collections, he underwent a conversion. Rather than winding the place down, he told the trustees that the Museum should be vigorously expanded and provided with an endowment. He shrewdly noted that the exhibitions should cease to focus on boring fossil invertebrates, but instead look to "lions" and other big mammals to arouse the public interest. He argued passionately that the Museum could be "a power of great good" for the people of New York City. The trustees were impressed by his report, and when Robert L. Stuart resigned, they made Jesup the third President of the Museum.

    Jesup's presidency lasted more than a quarter-century, and during that time he completely transformed the Museum. In 1881, when he arrived, there were some 54,000 square feet of exhibits; twenty-five years later, there were close to 600,000. In 1881, the Museum employed twelve people; by 1906 the number had grown to 185. In 1881, the endowment was zero; in 1906, it stood at well over a million dollars. Much of this was due to Jesup.

    Jesup was one of the nineteenth century's quintessential self-made men. He was a man of great self-control, with an uncompromisingly moralistic view of the world. He was born in 1830 into a strictly religious and quite wealthy family. Theatergoing, cardplaying, and dancing were forbidden as the Devil's amusements. Morris was the fifth of eight brothers and sisters. He was devoted to his mother, to Christian duty and the Presbyterian Church, to charity and honor. His many charities included the New York City Mission and Tract Society (which published Christian tracts and distributed them with zeal to the poorer classes), the Five Points House of Industry (a rehabilitation center for wayward boys), the American Sunday School Union, the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and the Society for the Relief of Half-Orphan and Destitute Children, among others.

    His life was uneventful until 1837, when the serious financial panic of that year completely wiped out the family fortune. Almost immediately afterward, the seven-year-old Jesup's father died, leaving Mrs. Jesup a destitute widow with eight children to support Gesup would later see all his siblings but one die of tuberculosis). His family's financial condition continued to grow worse until, at the age of twelve, Jesup was forced to drop out of school to help support his mother. He landed a job as a messenger boy at the Wall Street firm of Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor, run by one of his father's old friends and Jesup's namesake, Morris Ketchum. Rogers, Ketchum & Grosvenor manufactured locomotives and cotton mill machinery, and Jesup began learning the business.

    From this pathetic, Horatio Alger–like beginning, Jesup amassed and then gave away one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century. In 1852, at age twenty-two, Jesup left the firm, and with a bookkeeper named Charles Clark set up Clark & Jesup. This firm did a commission business, buying railroad supplies from manufacturers and reselling them to the railroads. It was a financial success, and several years later Jesup formed a new concern, M.K. Jesup & Company, which in time branched out into the investment banking business, eventually buying entire railroads. Jesup's specialty was to buy a controlling interest in a failing railroad, reorganize it, and sell it at a spectacular profit. When he became one of the original Museum incorporators in 1869, he had only been in business seventeen years and had already built a vast fortune.

    Jesup was fifty-one when he was elected to the presidency of the Museum, and at fifty-four he retired from business to devote himself to it full-time. His sixth-grade education never hindered his understanding of science, and may in fact have been an asset. One scientist wrote, "He began his duties untrammelled by tradition. He was the advocate of no established school or method.... His oft-repeated remark, 'I am a plain, unscientific man; I want the exhibits to be