Repository: UIHistories Project: Book - History of the University (Powell) [PAGE 360]

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History University of Illinois

system, if frozen, dies, so a tree frozen to the heart will die also. Over this Dunlap sorrowed publicly in the Chicago Tribune of March 2, 1869. He said plainly that what was needed at the university was not a theological professor "certainly not a man who thinks that because a man dies who is frozen stiff ergo that a tree dies that is frozen to the heart, but what is needed is a good business man." Yet at the second annual meeting of the board of trustees held at the university March 9, 1869, Dr. J. M. Gregory was elected regent. The name of Jonathan B. Turner was proposed and he received two votes notwithstanding the fact that he was not seeking the office. A friend on the board thought Turner might accept the position if it were offered; and, with him at the head, the uneasiness and public lack of confidence in the university would disappear. But the majority of the board had confidence in Gregory's power to succeed in a difficult situation. Also they felt that his two years experience in Illinois as the head of the institution was too valuable to lose, that he was a man with the ability to grow and that he had the interest of industrial education at heart. In his journal for this period Gregory comments thus briefly upon the course of events. "1869—In March the Trustees at their meeting re-elected me Regent for two years, the legal time. In May, having asked leave of absence for the summer, I sailed for Europe purposing to spend the vacation in visiting the schools of Europe. During the summer I visited England, France, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, and Belgium, experiencing great pleasure and gaining much useful information. I returned in September after an absence of about four months, very much improved in health." During the summer of 1869 an expedition through Illinois, the first effort of the kind undertaken by the university, was made for the purpose of survey and collection in the department of natural history. The appropriation of three hundred dollars for the expedition had been made at the annual meeting of the board in 1869, and the expenditure of that sum was placed in the competent hands of Thomas J. Burrill, who with five or six students, was thus enabled to make for the university a collection of plants, birds, reptiles, insects, mammals, a number of fossils, of fresh