forever, in the support of those courses of lectures in the city of Boston." Over the course of the next four years, Lowell traveled through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Armenia, Persia, and Egypt, down the Nile to Khartoum, through Ethiopia, and ultimately to India. Although the bequest providing for "the maintenance and support of public lectures, to be delivered in Boston, upon philosophy, natural history, the arts and sciences, or any of them, as the trustee shall, from time to time, deem expedient for the promotion of the moral, and intellectual, and physical instruction or education of the citizens of Boston" had been set forth before his departure from Boston, "– in a codicil to his will written "amidst the ruins of Thebes" and, subsequently, in letters written from Egypt, he further amplified his ideas about the trust. Although he expressed a preference for lectures on religion and on topics that would contribute to the material prosperity of the region, he ceded to his trustee discretion to "establish lectures on any subject that, in his opinion, the wants and taste of the age may demand". Lowell became gravely ill during a camel trip across the Egyptian desert and died on March 4, 1836, shortly after arriving in Bombay, India. Lowell Institute Although large-scale philanthropic gestures were a relative novelty in early nineteenth century America, the idea of an elite institution providing popular lectures by eminent scientists and scholars was not. Having spent much of his youth in England, Lowell was undoubtedly familiar with the Royal Institution – an entity that sponsored basic scientific research and popular lectures and demonstrations. Lowell, a supporter of the Lyceum movement, first showed interest in providing education for the public as a founding member of the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1830. After becoming ill while traveling through Egypt in 1835, John Lowell Jr. revised his will to create a trust to fund free public lectures in Boston on the subjects of philosophy, natural history, and the arts and sciences. The trust—or Lowell Institute, as it came to be known—had an unusual mode of governance: a single trustee who was empowered to appoint his successor and who was, in the language of Lowell's will, "always choose in preference to all others some male descendant of my grandfather, John Lowell, provided there be one who is competent to hold