Some of the Founders and Workers of the Kansas Natural History Society and the Kansas Academy of Science

Abstract

In the middle 1860's with the establishment of the state government at Topeka and the organization of the State University at Lawrence, the State Agricultural College at Manhattan and the State Normal School at Emporia, many young men and women, fresh from college, came to Kansas to take positions in these several institutions. Kansas at that time was new ground for workers in the sciences and they speedily began investigating their novel surroundings, finding much that was new to these teachers educated in the eastern colleges. Those interested in natural history speedily gravitated to a common center and founded the Kansas Natural History Society in 1868. The members subdivided the field for investigation, each taking subjects for study in which he had become especially interested in his college days back east. The first president of the Natural History Society, Prof. B. F. Mudge, of the Agricultural College, selected for his special line of work, geology, and traveled widely over the state collecting rocks, fossils and minerals and making frequent reports to the Society, describing his discoveries. His trips over western Kansas were made somewhat dangerous by the hostility of the Indians, who did not understand why he should be collecting rocks from their hills, and other hunters should be killing their buffalo with many-shot guns. A president of the Agricultural College who was not acquainted with Mudge was not wiser than these natives of Kansas, for he caused his collection of old bones and stones to be thrown out of the museum onto a refuse heap. Some weeks later Professor Mudge visited Manhattan and investigated the refuse heap. He discovered some fossil shells new to science that he had collected in Saline county. Very fortunately the bones of toothed birds, Odontornithes, which Professor Mudge found in western Kansas were not left in the museum of the Agricultural College, but rest securely in the museum of Yale University. Among these collectors of specimens in natural history, Prof. F. H. Snow of the State University, ranks easily first. In 1905 he had in his collection of insects more than 170,000 specimens belonging to 21,000 species. Besides this magnificent collection of insects, Doctor Snow had made a fine collection of plants, several Kansas meteorites, a complete list of Kansas birds, a good collection of fossils and had accumulated valuable data for a study of Kansas weather. Doctor Snow learned that the museums of the world were anxious to get specimens of a certain tiger beetle that might be found in semiarid regions such as those in western Kansas. He accordingly made a trip to western Kansas with some student helpers. At first unsuccessful, the party found this beetle, Amblychila cylindriformis, in great abundance, so many that Doctor Snow sold part of the collection for enough to pay the expenses of the trip and the expenses of the students until they graduated. Warren Knaus, editor of a paper at McPherson, Kan., collected only beetles, but with such success that in 1905 he had collected members of 5,512 species and in 19131 had increased the number to about 75,000 specimens belonging to