Page [14]

His effort was successful and he got a job in Prairie du Chien, but 
returned shortly to Madison, drawn by the thought that here 'he might earn
enough to 
enter the University. "This was my ambition, and it never wavered no
matter what 
I was doing," he later wrote, and he added: 
"No University, it seemed to me, could be more admirably situated, and
as 
I sauntered about it, charmed with its fine lawns and trees and beautiful
lakes, and 
saw the students going and coming with their books...I thought that if I
could only 
join them it would be the greatest joy of my life. I was desperately hungry
and 
thirsty for knowledge and willing to endure anything to get it." 
At about this time, I might say parenthetically, the Regents of the 
University were taking quite a hiding for those lawns and trees which so
attracted 
Muir. They had plunged the University into debt to erect what now is Bascom
Hall, 
and were hearing from both the faculty and the legislature about their extravagance.
Professor James D. Butler wrote that the "money laid out in sodding
and so forth 
would have seated several recitation rooms and bought many books." One
assemblyman 
proposed an investigation of the University's financial conditions, the cost
of its 
buildings, and "for what these buildings are" and to ascertain
"whether that 
institution has ever been of any benefit to the people of this State,"
and whether 
it "would not be for the best interests of the State to donate said
institution to 
the small city of Madison, under the conditions to pay the debts for the
same..and 
release the State from all other liabilities." 
To make ends meet the Board of Regents cut the number of professors to 
five and reduced their salaries to $1,000 per year. 
It was such a University which welcomed young John Muir though he was ill
prepared in a formal sense for University work. It was here, and walking
through 
the park we dedicate to him today, that John Muir, boy inventor, became John
Muir, 
naturalist. 
"I received my first lesson in botany from a student by the name of
Griswold," Muir later reported. 
"One memorable day in June when I was standing on the stone steps of
North Dormitory"--now North Hall--"Mr. Griswold joined me and at
once began to teac, 
He reached up, plucked a flower from an overspreading branch of a Locust
tree, and 
handing it to me said, 'Muir do you know what family this tree belongs to?'
Muir didn't and his first lesson followed. 
"This fine lesson charmed me and sent me flying to the woods and meadows
in wild enthusiasm," Muir later wrote. "Like everybody else I was
always fond of 
flowers, attracted by their external beauty and purity.   Now my eyes were
opened to 
their inner beauty, all alike revealing glorious traces of the thoughts of
God, and 
leading on and on into the infinite cosmos. I wandered away at every opportunity,
making long excursions round the lakes, gathering specimines and keeping
them fresh 
in a bucket in my room to study at night after my regular class tasks were
learned; 
for my eyes never closed on the plant glory I had seen." 
That , rount is from Muir 's book "The Story of My Boyhood and Youth."
With constant care the University managed to keep alive, until 1953, that
Locust tree which gave John Muir his first lesson in botany. Then, when it
iled, 
some of the wood was preserved, and a gavel made from it is used each month
at the 
meetings of the University Regents. I have it here today. 
-more-