Repository: UIHistories Project: Board of Trustees Minutes - 1894 [PAGE 306]

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STATE LABORATORY OF NATURAL HISTORY.

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The zoological display was made in accordance with detailed plans prepared by the director of the State Laboratory. The execution of these plans was confided to Mr. Charles F. Adams* for the birds; and t o , Prof. H. E. Summers for the insects. The material for the ornithological exhibit was chiefly obtained by special collections made for the purpose during the winter of 1891 and t h e spring and summer of 1892 by parties sent out from t h e laboratory, and mounted by Mr. Adams himself. As it was quite impossible to make a complete collection of the birds of the state within so short a time, the deficiencies remaining were supplied by selections made from the museums of the University of Illinois, at Urbana, and of t h e State Board of Agriculture, at Springfield, and by purchase of skins from taxidermists. The entomological exhibit was likewise provided in part from special collections made by laboratory employes and by assistants especially engaged for the purpose, and in still greater part from the cabinets of the State Laboratory and of the University of Illinois. The beautiful colored drawings, one hundred and one in number, distributed through the entomological exhibit to illustrate species too small to be well seen by the naked eye, were made at the State Laboratory by Miss Lydia M. Hart, the special artist of the establishment. The ichthyological collections were all made during the season of 1893 by assistants sent from t h e laboratory, Mr. J. E. Hallinen, a student of the University, doing the greater part of the field and laboratory work. I t may be proper to place on record here some statement of the manner in which this exhibit was received by those best qualified to appreciate it. In the Auk\ for October, 1893, Dr. Frank M. Chapman, of the American Museum of Natural History, at Central Park, New York, writes in an article on "Ornithology at the World's Fair" t h a t "Illinois was easily t h e leader in the department of local collections representing t h e bird life of a state or province." " I t s collection," he says, "placed in the state building, is well mounted, and the method of arrangement is one which might well be followed in the display of similar collections." Elsewhere he says, t h a t it is by far the best state collection t h a t he has ever seen. Dr. Robert Bldgway, curator of ornithology to the United States National Museum, writes of it also as "incomparably superior to any other state exhibit at the fair, and a very close competitor with the government exhibit." He says, " I do not see how, making due allowance for limited time and means, it could have been improved." Equally flattering comments were made upon the entomological features of the exhibit by economic entomologists, both American and foreign, t h e collection of apple insects especially, and t h a t exhibiting t h e food of a single robin for one year, attracting wide attention. The entire mass of this material, excepting only a few birds borrowed from the museum of the University and seventy-one specimens from t h a t of the State Department of Agriculture, was, at the close of t h e Exposition, transferred by the State World's Fair Commissioners to t h e Illinois State Laboratory of Natural History and removed t o Urbana. The ornithological collection thus acquired I have placed in the museum of the University, so far as the cases there will contain them, and the remaining material is now in the collection room of the State Laboratory, in the basement of Natural History Hall.

*The sudden and wholly unexpected death of Mr. Adams, at Chicago, while engaged in the i n stallation of thin exhibit, to whose preparation he had devoted nearly two years ot intense and unremitting labor, brought to a mournful and untimely end the promising career of an excellent naturalist and a most lovable man. Admirably equipped by his university education, by his very unusual artistic skill as a preparator of zoological material, and by his experiences of scientific travel in various parts of the world, he seemed at the beginning of a life of eminent usefulness to science and to the State. fA quarterly journal, the organ of the American Ornithologists 1 Union.