August, '10] OBITUARY 383 



Obituary 



DR. CYRUS THOMAS 



Dr. Cyrus Thomas, state entomologist of Illinois from 1875 to 1882, 

 died at "Washington, D. C, June 27, 1910, at the age of eighty-five 

 years. His career was of a kind unusual even for its time, and now 

 no longer possible. Beginning active life as a practising lawyer in 

 southern Illinois, he became in succession a Lutheran clergyman, an 

 assistant on the geological survey of the territories, a normal school 

 science teacher, a state entomologist, and an ethnologist in the Ameri- 

 can Bureau of Ethnology at Washington, serving in this latter ca- 

 pacity for the last twenty-eight years of his long life. 



He was born in Eangsport, in eastern Tennessee, July 27, 1825. 

 After studying law in Tennessee, he removed to Jackson County, Il- 

 linois, in 1819, was admitted to the bar in 1851, and practised at 

 Murphysboro until 1864. He then entered the ministry of the Evan- 

 gelical Lutheran Church, and preached until 1869, when he was ap- 

 pointed entomologist and botanist to the Geological Survey of the 

 Territories, under Doctor Hayden, serAdng in that capacity until 1873. 

 From 1874 to 1876 he was teacher of natural sciences in the Southern 

 Illinois State Normal School, then recently opened. He was ap- 

 pointed to the office of state entomologist April 13, 1875, and resigned 

 early in 1882, to take effect June 30 of that year. For five years of 

 this period he was also a member of the United States Entomological 

 Commission. 



He began to publish entomological papers, mostly in the Prairie 

 Farmer of Chicago, as early as 1859, when he was still in active prac- 

 tice as a lawyer, and in the following year he engaged with B. D. 

 "Walsh in a spirited controversy, running through several numbers of 

 that journal, concerning the life history of the army-worm. In the 

 fifth volume of the Transactions of the State Agricultural Society, 

 printed in 1864, are three prize essays on entomology by "Walsh, 

 LeBaron and Thomas, who afterwards became respectively the first, 

 second and third state entomologists of Illinois. Doctor Thomas be- 

 came one of the leading specialists on the Acrididce of the United 

 States, publishing a monograph of that family in the report of the 

 Geological Survey of the Territories in 1873. Later he gave special 

 attention to the Aphididce, and his third report as state entomologist 

 is one of the most important descriptive publications on that family 

 which has ever yet appeared. 



In his economic work in Illinois he was severely handicapped by 

 the penurious policy of the state with respect to the entomologist's 



