4 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 1 37 



to North American Birds" (which he still has), and then prepared 

 specimens as museum-type skins. 



After 7 years in Kansas the family moved again, this time to 

 southern California, where they finally settled on a 20-acre "ranch" 

 in Ontario, planted to oranges, prunes, and grapes. In Ontario the 

 15-year-old Snodgrass (called Rob at this age) entered a Methodist 

 preparatory school of high-school level, then known as Chaff ey Col- 

 lege. Here he studied Latin, Greek, French, German, physics, chem- 

 istry, and drawing, but no biology which might involve evolution. On 

 the side, however, he read Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley, thereby 

 becoming branded as a heretic. His interest in anatomy now was 

 awakened and he spent Saturdays, and Sundays after church, dis- 

 secting birds, cats, frogs, crayfishes, and other animals. Notes and 

 drawings from these endeavors provided entrance credit in zoology 

 when he later went to Stanford University. But his openly avowed 

 belief in evolution estranged him at home and caused him to be ex- 

 pelled from Sunday school, much to his satisfaction. 



In 1895, at the age of 20, Rob Snodgrass entered Stanford Uni- 

 versity and majored in zoology. The whole atmosphere now was 

 changed. He had excellent courses in general zoology, embryology, 

 and comparative vertebrate anatomy. From Dr. David Starr Jordan, 

 who was then president of Stanford University, he of course learned 

 something about fishes. It seemed to him, however, that nearly every- 

 thing must already be known about vertebrate animals, so as a side 

 course he took entomology under Prof. V. L. Kellogg. Soon Profes- 

 sor Kellogg set him to work on the anatomy of the Mallophaga — 

 biting-lice, a group in which the professor was specializing at the time. 

 The prospect of doing original work that might even be published 

 inspired Snodgrass to acquire a new outlook on life and provided the 

 impetus for investigations from which came his first two publications 

 (I and 2), 2 "The Mouth Parts of the Mallophaga" (1896) and "The 

 Anatomy of the Mallophaga" (1899). The long-cherished dream of 

 being an ornithologist was given up. 



While a student at Stanford University, Rob Snodgrass had two 

 interesting and profitable trips. The first took him, as one of a party 

 selected by Dr. Jordan, to the Pribilof Islands to study the habits of 

 the fur seals. At that time a dispute involving other countries existed 

 over the right to kill seals in the ocean. The second was a lo-month 

 trip with Edmund Heller to the Galapagos Islands in a 100-ton sailing 



2 Numbers in parentheses refer to the Snodgrass bibliography that follows 

 this paper. 



