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Kansas Academy of Science. 



JAMES RICHARD MEAD. 



By J. T. LOVEWELL, Topeka. 



TN THE death of Col. J. R. Mead our Academy has lost one of its 

 -*- life members and one of the oldest living members of our 

 organization. He was a typical Kansas man and a pioneer of 

 frontier life, whose word was always recognized as authority in all 

 questions of history and early life on the plains. 



JAMES RICHARD MEAD. 



Born in Vermont in 1836, his parents removed with him, when 

 three years old, to Davenport, Iowa, where he grew up and ob- 

 tained his school education. In early manhood he was led by the 

 reports and persuasions of Col. Jas. R. Lane and others to move to 

 the plains of middle and western Kansas, where for the next fifty 

 years he continued to reside, and he took a prominent part in all 

 the vicissitudes of frontier life. These opportunities furnished 

 him with a vast fund of information, which he used in addresses 

 and communications published in the Transactions of the Academy, 

 in Proceedings of the Historical Society, and in various public 

 journals and magazines. 



