Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1890 [PAGE 179]

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UNIVERSITY O F ILLINOIS.

spacious halls the museum of natural history, the library, the art gallery, and the museum of industrial art. The chapel wing contains the chapel, the physical laboratory and lecture room, and rooms occupied by the schools of architecture and of art and design. In the main front are convenient class rooms with, in the upper floor, elegant halls for literary societies. The budding is warmed by steam. The mechanical building is of brick, 126 feet in length, and 88 feet in width. It contains a boiler-room, a machine shop, furnished for practical use with a steam engine and lathes, and other machinery; pattern and finishing shop; testing laboratory; shops for carpentry and cabinet work, furnished with wood-working machinery. The blacksmith shop, 32 by 36 feet, contains sixteen forges with anvils and tools, and a cupola for melting iron. The chemical building, erected in 1878, at a cost, including furniture, of $40,000, contains five laboratories, and is one of the best and largest in the United States. A new military building, erected in 1889-90, 100 by 150 feet in one grand hall, gives ample space for company and battalion maneuvers and for large audiences upon special occasions. There are, in addition, a veterinary hall, a small astronomical observatory, two dormitories, three dwellings, two large barns, and a greenhouse.

MUSEUMS AND COLLECTIONS.

The museum of zoology and geology occupies a hall sixty-one by seventy-nine feet, with a gallery on three sides, and is completely furnished with wall, table and alcove cases. It already contains interesting and important collections, equaled at fewT, if any, of the colleges of the West. They have been specially selected and prepared to illustrate the courses of study in the school of natural history, and to present a synoptical view of the zoology of the state. Zoology.—The mounted mammals comprise an unusually large and instructive collection of the ruminants of our country, including male and female moose, elk, bison, deer, antelope, etc., and also several quadrumana, large carnivora, and fur-bearing animals, numerous rodents, and good representative marsupials, cetaceans, edentates, and monotremes. Fifty species of this class are represented by eighty specimens. The collection of mounted birds (about five hundred and fifty specimens, of three hundred species) includes representatives of all the orders and families of North America, together with a number of characteristic tropical forms. Many of these specimens are excellent examples of artistic taxidermy. A series of several hundred unmounted skins is available for the practical study of species.