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Caption: Book - History of the University (Powell)
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140 History University of Illinois Mr. Murray's father, James B. Murray, was a prominent army officer, a Colonel of a regiment of artillery in the War of 1812, a man who had traveled widely and was a friend of many of the leading statesmen and diplomats both at home and abroad. These facts explain an incident related by Mr. Murray of his early experience: " I remember my father taking me by the hand one day in 1824 and walking down to a Hudson river pier near the Battery, and, with a large number of persons, boarding a steamboat, I think it was called the Bellona, and I think Commodore Vanderbilt was its Captain. I was told we were going to meet General LaFayette and bring him to New York from Amboy." A painful accident that occurred of a sailor having his arms blown off obscured in the young boy's mind any recollections of the noted Frenchman. The account of his early education shows how he acquired not only a dislike to methods then employed in teaching, but to the "dead literature'' the teachers endeavored to drive in. After referring to an incident of November 4, 1825, when he went with his father to witness the parade and procession on land and water in honor of the opening of the Erie canal, the "marriage of the waters" as it was called, he wrote further: "Shortly after that I was sent to boarding school at Jamaica, Long Island. Here I remained for two years and toecame acquainted with the fever and ague, together with the rudiments of education, enforced dexterously with a flat ruler, by the learned teacher, on the prominent part of the person of the boy who was laying face downward over the edge of the platform while his feet were on the floor. Principal Eigenbroght allowed no other master to administer flaggelation, and he seems to have fancied that the dead languages could be incorporated by that operation into the vulnerable part of a recreant, who could not receive it intellectually otherwise, for I distinctly remember he would point with his rule at one boy in the class before him and order him to conjugate a Latin verb, and then, while the boy was conjugating, the ruler would be brought with a smarting smash upon the rotund muscle below, a pair of little heels would perform acrobatic motions in the air; the ruler would point at the next aspirant for dead
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