Albion College - Albionian Yearbook (Albion, MI)

Page 18 text:

LIBRARIES, LABORATORIES AND OBSERVATORY LIBRARIES. The Library Building, the gift of Mrs. Charlotte T. Gassette, of Albion, Michigan, is a substantial new brick structure, well equipped, well heated, well lighted, con- taining 18,500 volumes, besides unbound volumes and pamphlets. The Reading Room, ample and attractive, is abun- dantly supplied with encyclopedia, dictionaries, lexicons, and general works of reference, together with such books as are temporarily assigned by members of the Faculty for reference work and collateral reading. A generous supply of papers and leading magazines of the day is pro- vided. The contents of periodicals are made available by the use of Poole ' s Index and its supplements and the Reader ' s Guide to Periodical Literature. The Dewey system of classification is used and a new- card catalogue makes the books easily accessible. Free access to the shelves is allowed, and in addition to their use in the Library building, books, with some restrictions, may be drawn for home use. The Library is open on school days from 8:00 a. m. to 12:00 m.; from 2:00 p. m. to 5:30 p. m., and three even- ings in the week from 6:30 to 8:30; Saturday from 8:00 a. m. to 12:00 m. PROVISIONS FOR THE STUDY OF ASTRONOMY. In Astronomy, the facilities offered by the College are excellent. The equipment is fully adequate for purposes of in- struction or research. The Equatorial Telescope is of eight inches clear aperture, made and mounted by Alvan Clark Sons. It is provided with circles, coarse and fine, driving clock, filar micrometer, with field and side

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CHARACTER OF THE SCHOOL The institution is a college of Liberal Arts. It is not a theological school. There are a few Biblical studies, but no chair of theology. There are no theological tests and no religious exactions beyond regular attendance at chapel exercises during school days and attendance at church on the Sabbath, giving the students their choice of place of worship.

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YEAR BOOK 15 illumination, and eye pieces giving range from a low- power comet-seeker to eight hundred diameters. The Transit Circle, by Fauth Co., is of a four-inch aperture and is provided with micrometers in right ascension and declination, levels sensitive to one second of arc and verti- cle circles reading to single seconds by micrometer micro- scopes. The Sidereal Clock and Chronograph are by the same makers. , All of the instruments are in electrical connection. PROVISIONS FOR THE STUDY OF BIOLOGY. The Biological Department occupies the new Biologi- cal Laboratory, erected as an addition to Robinson Hall. This addition is 45 by 60 feet, three stories high, above the basement. It contains large laboratories for the classes in Zoology and Botany, accommodating respective- ly 60 and 40 students. Besides the large windows at the end of each table there are electric lights and gas arc lights that afford ample illumination for evenings or dark days. There are commodious lecture rooms adjoining each. Besides these laboratories there are smaller labo- ratories for more advanced classes, with the same lighting arrangements as in the larger laboratories, as described above. Store rooms and supply rooms, with a large room for a working Botanical Museum occupy the remainder of the space on the lower three floors. On the upper floor are rooms for Museum workshops, with a suite of three rooms which are fully equipped for photographic pur- poses. The Biological Department is well supplied with such apparatus as is needed for its work, including over sixty compound microscopes, rocking, sliding and rotary micro- tomes, incubator, aquaria, embedding apparatus and a collection of several thousand mounted slides. The Botanical Working Museum is especially designed to con- tribute to the work in Ecology. It already contains over one thousand species in the herbarium, nearly all from this locality, and many of them represented in numerous