60 KANSAS CITY REVIEW OF SCIENCE. 
OBIE CAI NG. 
SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF PROF. W. K. KEDZER: 
Prof. William K. Kedzie, who was known to many of our readers as former 
Professor of Chemistry at the Kansas Agricultural College, and who will be re- 
membered by hundreds of the citizens of this city as having delivered a memora™ 
ble address at the Commencement Exercises of the Kansas City College of Physi 
cians and Surgeons in 1877, died-at Lansing, Michigan, of typhoid fever, on the 
14th of April. He was skilled.in his profession, an excellent teacher, a ready and 
perspicuous writer, and a fluent and attractive public speaker. In addition to 
these qualifications, few men possessed finer social qualities. We condense the 
following items from the Jndustrialist : 
He was born at Kalamazoo, Michigan, July 5th, 1851. He graduated from 
the Michigan State Agricultural College at the age of 19, and at once entered 
upon his duties as assistant to his father, the esteemed Professor of Chemistry in 
the same Institution. The two winters succeeding his graduation were spent at 
Yale College, in study, under Profs. Johnson and Brush, who testified to his great 
skill in manipulation and proficiency in his favorite branch—chemistry. 
In the summer of 1873, Prof. Kedzie received a call to the chair of Chemis- 
try and Physics, in the Kansas State Agricultural College. Commencing with 
an almost entire absence of the most ordinary essentials in imparting chemical 
knowledge—without a course of study, without a lecture-room, and without stu- 
dents even—he succeeded within three years in making chemistry the most 
attractive study taught in the Institution, and his department, in point of equip- 
ment and laboratory conveniences, superior to anything of the kind in the West. 
In January, 1874, Professor Kedzie was elected chemist to the State Board 
of Agriculture, and at once he commenced and carried through a vast amount of 
work in the line of chemical analysis. All the principal sorts of Kansas soils, 
minerals, grains, and even fungi, were subjected by him to rigid chemical exami- 
nation, and the results have been accounted among the most valuable in the 
records of our State B ard. 
In the summer of 1875, the Professor spent four months in Europe, during 
which time he made a careful examination of the principal laboratories of the 
Continent and England. The ideas there obtained he was enabled, the following 
year, to embody in the magnificent laboratory of the Kansas Agricultural College. 
In July, 1876, he was united in marriage to Miss Ella Gale, of Manhattan, who 
is left with two small children to mourn his loss. In 1878 he received an urgent 
call to the chair of Chemistry and Physiology, in Oberlin, Ohio, of which his 
uncle was president, which he finally accepted, and entered upon the duties of 
