Kansas Academy of Science. 355 



NECROLOGY. 



LEWIS LINDSEY DYCHE. 



Gut West Wilson. 



THE subject of the present sketch, Prof. Lewis Lindsey 

 Dyche, was born in Berkeley Springs, W. Va., March 20. 

 1857, of Scotch-Irish parentage. When he was three months 

 old his father decided to remove to Kansas. The family came 

 by boat to St. Joseph, Mo., and thence by ox team along the 

 old Santa Fe trail to a point on the Wakarusa fifteen miles 

 southwest of Topeka. Before their arrival at the new home 

 the mother was taken very ill, and the babe was of necessity 

 poorly attended. A band of Indians had their winter camp 

 near the new home, and seeing the sad plight of the new- 

 comers, took pity upon them. The women of the camp min- 

 istered to mother and babe, nursing the former back to health. 

 Here the babe, the subject of this sketch, grew to young man- 

 hood. "With the precocity often seen in the pioneer life, he 

 seemed to pass from infancy to manhood with no intervening 

 period of boyishness or youth. All pleasures were combined 

 with business. At the age of nine he was hunting and trap- 

 ping along the Wakarusa. His playmates were his dogs ; his 

 playthings were the beasts and birds; his playgrounds were 

 the woods and prairies and the camps of the Indians."^ He 

 was a lover of the open, an admirer of the wild life about him. 

 In these early days he began to show the traits which were 

 later to give him a place high in the ranks of American nat- 

 uralists. 



It is said that at the age of twelve he was unacquainted 

 with the alphabet, and at sixteen was possessed of such scant 

 learning that he was ashamed to show his ignorance in the 

 village school. His educational progress was slow in the 

 earlier years of his life, yet he attained an enviable eminence 

 in later years. Finally he determined to secure an education. 

 He had accumulated $600, with which he accordingly went to 

 the State Normal School at Emporia, remaining for three 



1. Edwords, Camp-fires of a Naturalist, p. 2. 



