THE BROSS FOUNDATION 



THE Bross Lectures are an outgrowth of a fund 

 established in 1879 by the late William Bross, 

 Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois from 1866 to 

 1870. Desiring some memorial of his son, Na- 

 thaniel Bross, who died in 1856, Mr. Bross entered 

 into an agreement with the ' Trustees of Lake 

 Forest University," whereby there was finally 

 transferred to them the sum of forty thousand dol- 

 lars, the income of which was to accumulate in 

 perpetuity for successive periods of ten years, the 

 accumulations of one decade to be spent in the 

 following decade, for the purpose of stimulating 

 the best books or treatises "on the connection, re- 

 lation and mutual bearing of any practical science, 

 the history of our race, or the facts in any depart- 

 ment of knowledge, with and upon the Christian 

 Religion." The object of the donor was to "call 

 out the best efforts of the highest talent and the ripest 

 scholarship of the world to illustrate from science, 

 or from any department of knowledge, and to demon- 

 strate the divine origin and the authority of the 

 Christian Scriptures; and, further, to show how 

 both science and revelation coincide and prove the 

 existence, the providence, or any or all of the attri- 



