54 Kansas Academy of Science. 



It is then fitting in this, our celebration of the completion of the first 

 half century of its history, that we render tribute to this good man. And 

 he was a good man. And in his modest way he was a great man ; his name 

 shall be remembered as long as this Academy lasts; yea, as long as Kan- 

 sas lasts. It was not until ten years later that I became a member of it, 

 proposed for membership, I am proud to say, by Professor Mudge, and 

 read my first paper before it, almost my first attempt in science author- 

 ship. I remember some of its members of those early days, my preceptor 

 in medicine, Dr. J. Robinson, among them. There are others who remem- 

 ber more. Among the founders was another dear friend, my colleague at 

 the University of Kansas for twelve years, Prof. Frank H. Snow. 

 His name, too, like that of Mudge, is engraved in aes perennis. 



To most of my hearers fifty years is a long time. To me in my memory 

 of those events and of those faces it is as but yesterday. None of its 

 founders now remain and few of its earliest members. 



But in science the time has been immeasurably long, long in its ac- 

 complishments, longer than all the thousands of years of civilized history 

 prior thereto. I can recall vividly my youthful summary a few years 

 later of the accomplishments of science in the preceding fifty years. They 

 seemed vast to me then in my youthful wonder. The chief things were 

 the electric telegraph, photography, the locomotive, and the conservation 

 and correlation of forces, to which I may now add organic evolution. And 

 great indeed they were, fraught with the germs of our achievements of 

 the past fifty years. One sentence of my college essay lingers in my 

 memory: "Science has made a greater advancement in the past fifty 

 years than in all the preceding centuries!" 



He is a learned man to-day who is the master of a very small part of 

 what has been accomplished in these years. Professor Mudge taught me 

 the elements of all the natural and mathematical sciences of those days; 

 at least twenty college teachers of the same to-day would find their sub- 

 jects wide. There are scores of sciences to-day that have libraries larger 

 than that of all science in those times. There were then perhaps a score 

 of men in the United States who were actively engaged in scientific re- 

 search, men whose names were known throughout the nation among the 

 scholarly, and perhaps a hundred or two throughout the world; there are 

 ' thousands to-day, and there will be tens of thousands to-morrow. The 

 profession of science was then precarious, and its emoluments uncertain. 

 The scientific investigator was rarely wanted as a teacher, he was thought 

 to be unpractical and theoretical, for the world at large still looked upon 

 most science as merely bundles of useless theories. College teachers in 

 science as in other branches were usually chosen from among professional 

 teachers or the clerical profession. Medicine was almost the only avail- 

 able avenue to pure science and that was the chief reason why I studied 

 medicine. Perhaps the first chemical laboratory in the state of Kansas 

 was organized at the Kansas Agricultural College in 1873, with Pro- 

 fessor Kedzie in charge. The first compound microscope I ever saw was 

 in the same year. The Agricultural College catalogue for 1868 gravely 

 included in its list of its equipment for the teaching of science, a collec- 

 tion of minerals and fossils made by Professor Mudge, an electrical ma- 



