Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 146]

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138 bring into practical operation methods of anticipating, of mitigating, of controlling, or of absolutely destroying these evils, will be long, careful and intricate. We must believe that in most cases it will ultimately be successful. Evidently this University is the natural home of investigation and of instruction in the work, of these specialties. The University has been at much expense in providing not the best and most suitable accommodations for such work which could be devised, but those which will greatly facilitate the labors of Prof Forbes and his assistants. While providing for this work, equal care has been taken to advance the biological work of the University itself, and the equipment for that specialty has received much attention. The work of Professor Burrill in the more occult lines of botanical research has constantly progressed, and has been aided with better facilities, instrumental and other. The day can not be far distant when the State must furnish a distinct and well arranged building for the School of Natural History* which shall contain all its material for illustration, in museum and herbarium, and all its laboratories, work-rooms and class-rooms. It is a matter of present regret that the State University, an institution particularly devoted to technical and applied science, is almost entirely destitute of material to illustrate the geology of the State of Illinois. The University has sent its teachers and pupils into the prairies and forests of the State, has seined its streams, and netted its insects, and collected and mounted a goodly representation of its animal arid vegetable life. But although the State has expended large sums for a careful and thorough geological survey, and has in its possession a gre it wealth of material in the various departments of rocks, fossils, and minerals, the University has next to none at all. Here, if anywhere, these collections can have instructional and illustrative value. Elsewhere they are of necessity chiefly objects of curiosity, the delight of such as suppose a museum is normally a place of amusement. The State Geological Collection ought certainly to be deposited and displayed where it can give to science the largest and most useful returns. It is difficult to see where these ends can be had so certainly as at the State University; but if it should appear that in some other place its usefulness may be greater, surely the University may be permitted to use the duplicates which for so many years have lain in the basement of the State House in quiet seclusion, scarcely less complete than when they occupied their native graves in the strata of the earth, before the geological survey resurrected them from their sleep of eons. The School of Chemistry maintains its useful activity. Its pupils have been in so great demand that the University has not been able to keep its graduates for its own purposes as teachers, and has been compelled to secure its assistants elsewhere. Without being able to answer all the calls made upon it, it has nevertheless made many analyses for public officers, including the State Board of Health. Had the Laboratory done all of this work which has been asked of it, the entire time of an accomplished chemist would have been demanded and used. No call is now more constant than for instruc-