Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1886 [PAGE 170]

EXTRACTED TEXT FROM PAGE:

162 The facilities for zoological instruction now consist of a furnished students' laboratory, conveniently fitted with everything needful for our work to accommodate thirty-six students at a time. Microscopes and the apparatus of microscopy generally have been provided for the students in the year's course. A series of permanent preparations has been begun illustrating all the parts of the zoological course as at present organized,—these to be kept as an independent special collection. The museum collections and preparations have been regularly drawn upon for class use with the idea that it is better to replace a specimen occasionally, as it becomes injured by actual use, than to keep everything under lock and key as a display for chance visitors. The collections, apparatus, library, and facilities generally of the State Laboratory of Natural History, in rooms adjoining the student's laboratory, and those of the State Entomologist's office on the floor above, have been freely used in every way for class work, and especially as aids to the work of the postgraduate and special students of zoological and entomological rubjects. The condition of the Museum has changed only by accretion and by a revision of the labeling arrangement and mode of display of the alcoholics and a part of the shells. The principal additions have been a series of forty-two Blatschka glass models of perishable invertebrates; a set of thirty painted casts of Illinois fishes; ^about one thousand species of insects (not including the LeBaron collection) mounted and prepared for exhibition; and aboul two hundred skins of Illinois birds. The insects and half the fish casts are on exhibition at New Orleans, these collections having been prepared in pursuance of an arrangement with the Board of State Commissioners of the New Orleans Exposition, by virtue of which about $160 of the expense was saved the University. Between four and five thousand geological specimens purchased by the Begent and Professor Bolfe should also be included under this head. With respect to the development of the department, I believe that nothing is now more important than such announcement of its advantages for high-grade work as will attract to it a larger and better attendance,—although I am of the opinion that some further modification of its course, or some addition of special courses, may still be made with advantage. Those who are likely to elect a good natural history course in the University may be divided into four groups: (1) those who, seeking only a general, liberal education, are led to elect one with a biological rather than a literary basis; (2) those whose abilities or ambitions lie in the direction of a career as biological specialists; (3) those who are looking to a liberal preparation for the profession of medicine ; and (4) those preparing themselves as special teachers of science in colleges and high schools. The present course seems to me to provide practically for only the first of these groups, and our attendance in the natural history course is consequently principally made up of a certain percentage of the class, most of which go to the literary departments of the University. While I think the present natural history course is well adapted to the wants of these students, at least in its zoological and entomological features (with which