BROSS FOUNDATION, THE. In 1879 William Bross, who was Lieutenant-Governor of Illinois from 1866 to 1870, transferred to the " Trustees of Lake Forest University " the sum of forty thousand dollars to found a memorial to his son Nathaniel Bross (d. 1856). When the income accumulated it was to be devoted to the purpose of stimulating the best books or treatises " on the connection, relation and mutual bearing of any practical science, the history of our race, or the facts in any department of knowledge, with and upon the Christian Religion." The donor wished " 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 demonstrate 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 provid ence, or any or all of the attributes of the only living and true God, ' infinite, eternal and unchangeable in His being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.'" In 1900 the Trustees began to carry out the provisions of the trust. They decided to purchase and publish a series of books under the general title " The Bross Library." The first volume in this series was
the " Evidences of Christianity " by William Bross's " very dear friend and teacher, Mark Hopkins, D.D." A prize, open to " the scientific men, the Christian philosophers and historians of all nations," was offered in 1902, and was awarded in 1905 to James Orr, D.D., Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology in the United Free Church College, Glasgow. His treatise, " The Problem of the Old Testament " (1906) was Volume III. of the " Bross Library." The Trustees have also invited eminent scholars to deliver courses of lectures before Lake Forest College. The first course, on " Obligatory Morality," was given in 1903 by Francis Landey Patton, D.D., LL.D., President of Princeton Theological Seminary. The second course, on " The Bible: Its Origin and Nature," was given in 1904 by Marcus Dods, D.D., Professor of Exegetical Theology in New College, Edinburgh. The third course, on " The Bible of Nature," was given in 1907 by Mr. J. Arthur Thomson, M.A., Regius Professor of Natural History in the University of Aberdeen.