Repository: UIHistories Project: Course Catalog - 1886-1887 [PAGE 83]

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College of Natural Science.

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his first series of specimens in the cabinet of the University. Local collections and exchanges have increased the number to about three thousand species. The TJniversitv has about thirty compound microscopes, representing the best American and European makers. Zoology.—The Museum is particularly fortunate in its collections in Zoology, possessingj in mounted specimens of skeletons, nearly all the ruminants of North America, and representative of all orders of mammals except Proboscidea; exhibiting fifty species by eighty mounted specimens, with numerous skeletons. In birds it represents all the families of North America, having two hundred and forty species, represented by over four hundred specimens. Its Articulates number more than three thousand specimens; its fishes, four hundred; its radiates, three hundred, and its reptiles nearly one hundred. Sea, land, and fluviatile shells are represented by seventeen hundred species. The Museum also contains nearly one hundred specimens, representing the osteology of vertebrates; a large collection of the nests and eggs of birds; a collection of Indian implements; and a manikin, a dissected eye, and a trachea, in Papier-mache. Geology.—The Geological Cabinet contains Prof. Ward's celebrated college series of casts of famous fossils, including the gigantic Megatherium nearly eighteen feet in length; the Elephas Ganesa with tusks ten-and-a-half feet long; the Collossochelys Atlas,—a gigantic tortoise with a shell eight feet by six; and the Plesiosaurus Cramptoni, twenty-two and a half feet. It also contains a series of tracks in the sandstone of the Connecticut river; a large collection of carboniferous ferns from the celebrated locality at Morris, 111.; several thousand specimens of fossils from the State Geological Survey, and from purchase in Europe; and a large number of specimens illustrating building materials, dikes, veins, metamorphism, drift bowlders, etc.; about four thousand specimens, not yet arranged, have been added during the past year. Mineralogy.—The Cabinet of Minerals consists of a valuable and extensive collection of the leads of the State, and accompanying minerals; a collection of models, comprising the most important forms and combinations in the various systems of crystallization; and a very complete collection of minerals, both American and foreign.