purpose? He answered, that the government had no
such tract of land as this. It had nothing comparable to it for the
purposes of the University: This was to be a school of mining, of
engineering, of the working of metals, of chemistry, zoology, botany,
manufactures, agriculture, in short of all the complicated industries
that make a state great. There was no place for the location of such a
school like the Knobs of East Tennessee. The hills abounded in metals of
all sorts, iron in all its combinations, copper, bismuth, gold and silver
in small quantities, platinum he--believed, tin, aluminium; it was
covered with forests and strange plants; in the woods were found the
coon, the opossum, the fox, the deer and many other animals who roamed in
the domain of natural history; coal existed in enormous quantity and no
doubt oil; it was such a place for the practice of agricultural
experiments that any student who had been successful there would have an
easy task in any other portion of the country.

No place offered equal facilities for experiments in mining, metallurgy,
engineering. He expected to live to see the day, when the youth of the
south would resort to its mines, its workshops, its laboratories, its
furnaces and factories for practical instruction in all the great
industrial pursuits.

A noisy and rather ill-natured debate followed, now, and lasted hour
after hour. The friends of the bill were instructed by the leaders to
make no effort to check it; it was deemed better strategy to tire out the
opposition; it was decided to vote down every proposition to adjourn, and
so continue the sitting into the night; opponents might desert, then, one
by one and weaken their party, for they had no personal stake in the
bill.

Sunset came, and still the fight went on; the gas was lit, the crowd in
the galleries began to thin, but the contest continued; the crowd
returned, by and by, with hunger and thirst appeased, and aggravated the
hungry and thirsty House by looking contented and comfortable; but still
the wrangle lost nothing of its bitterness. Recesses were moved
plaintively by the opposition, and invariably voted down by the
University army.

At midnight the House presented a spectacle calculated to interest a
stranger. The great galleries were still thronged--though only with men,
now; the bright colors that had made them look like hanging gardens were
gone, with the ladies. The reporters' gallery, was merely