Semi-Centennial Volume. 35 



Symposium : Fifty Years of Scientific Development in Kansas. 

 The Kansas Academy of Science. 



W. A. HARSlIllAU<iKR. 



We are met to-day to celebrate one more of a series of events not 

 uncommon the last few years. It has not been many years since the 

 fiftieth anniversary of the admission of Kansas into the Union was 

 celebrated. Since then one after another of our older institutions of 

 learning has had a similar celebration. To-day the Kansas Academy of 

 Science completes its first half century, and we are met to honor the 

 event. These celebrations forcibly remind us that Kansas is still in her 

 infancy, and has a future instead of a past. 



The conditions to-day also strangely remind us of those at the time of 

 the birth of the Academy. In 1868, just after the close of a long, trying 

 war between two sections of our own country, the Academy came into be- 

 ing. Tc-day it enters its second half century in the midst of a world war. 

 It would seem that the world is having a rebirth. Some of our own 

 members whom we miss to-day have responded to their country's call 

 and are offering their all to make it a rebirth into an environment in 

 which democracy can live and prosper. 



The part assigned me in this program might appropriately be called 

 "Locking Backward." It is mine to sketch very briefly the foundation 

 and early history of the organization, and leave to others the special 

 lines of investigation that have been pursfted. 



In 1867 Prof. J. D. Barker was called to Lincoln college (now Wash- 

 burn). Observing that there was no scientific association in the state, 

 and that the scientists then at work had no organization to centralize 

 their work, and no uniform method of publication, he at once began to 

 agitate the matter of forming such an organization, but received no en- 

 couragement. People were busy with other things, and science received 

 but little attention. Finally he wrote to Professor Mudge, who was 

 heartily in favor of such a society, but feared the time was not ripe, 

 giving as one of his reasons that Professor Winchell had made a similar 

 attempt in Michigan and had failed. Professor Parker visited Professor 

 Mudge during the long vacation of 1867, and after thorough discussion 

 of the matter secured Professor Mudge's promise to go into the move- 

 ment. Several articles were then published urging the importance of 

 such an organization, and in the Journal of Education for March, 1868, 

 Professor Parker published the following notice: 



"We, the undersigned, desirous of securing the advantages arising 

 from the association in scientific pursuits, and of giving a more sys- 

 tematic direction to scientific research in our state, do hereby invite all 

 persons in the state interested in natural science to meet at Topeka on 

 the first Tuesday of September next, at 3 p. m., at the College building, 

 for the purpose of organizing a State Natural History Society." 



This call was signed by the following seventeen persons: John Fraser, 

 D. H. Robinson, B. F. Mudge, J. A. Banfield, J. S. Hougham, J. D. 

 Parker, R. A. Barker, D. Brockway, G. E. Chapin, J. H. Carruth, R. D. 

 Parker, Jeff. Robinson, Peter McVicar, F. H. Snow, J. S. Whitman, 

 Richard Cortiley, J. R. Swallow. The jneeting was held at the appointed 



