AT a ee kL ae eT 
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104 ILLINOIS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 
leading regions of the State from sand dunes, lake shores, river 
bottoms, valleys, and prairies, to forest regions, and give tangi- 
ble illustration of the excellent work being done by the 
Academy “Committee on Ecological Survey.” 
The tree exhibit would contain not only the trunks, leaves 
and fruit of the hundred and fifty kinds of trees growing in the 
State, but also fine illustrations of magnificent trees and 
samples of their products—boards, laths, shingles, clothes pins, 
wood pulp, paper and all the things made out of wood pulp 
even to car wheels. There would be a long list of things which 
illustrate what dendrologists know and what artists and manu- 
facturers can do. 
The zoological section would consist not simply of a great 
multitude of shells, insects, fish, birds and mammals, but would 
be a fascinating place where the visitor could delight in the 
varied and strange forms of insects and fish; the beautiful 
plumage of birds; the fine fur of mammals; the life-like groups, 
where artist and man of science combine to depict nature in her 
most charming and instructive forms and through cunningly 
devised arrangement of animal, flower, leaf and rock to explain 
what men know about the life habits, history, relationship and 
utility of the multitude of creatures which constitute the 
zoological world. 
In the department of ethnology as well as that of zoology 
there is a great field for artistic group work. At the Illinois 
State Museum there is promise of remarkable work being done 
in the field of ethnology, thanks to a gift of three thousand dol- 
lars one week ago today by a generous friend of the museum 
and thanks also to the promise of another friend to give the 
museum in the near future one of the greatest archaeological 
collections of its kind in the country. 
The amount of time represented by man on the earth is but a 
fraction of the years involved in the earth’s history. If we go 
back of modern history, back of the art of writing, back of the 
stone age, back of the “psychozoic era” ; back to reptiles, to fish, 
to the dim and nebulous times of gradual accretion of dust of 
the universe to form a world, each step is an interesting field 
not because of objects but because of what we know of them. 
