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UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN, LAWRENCE. KANSAS
SEPTEMBER 281945
Bugs---Two Million of 'em----in Snow Museum
They're All Dead and Well-Behaved. In This Collection Famous the Country Over
BY MARIAN THOMSON (Daily Kansan Staff Writer)
Bugs!
Big bugs, black bugs, bright bugs. Old bugs and new bugs. Hundreds of bugs, thousands of bugs. Two million bugs!
Two million of the world's most famous insects are right here on the campus. The Francis Huntington Snow Entomological museum, named for the University's first chancellor and housed in west Snow hall, is known widely for its completeness. This collection, owned by a
largest collection owned by a state university is consulted by expert entomologists the nation over.
Though dead and well-behaved, the insects require constant care. After they have dried on special handmade, non-rusting pins, and been identified and classified, they are put in glass-covered trays. The glass protects brittle tissues from breaking, but gives no protection from the light which, if they were exposed too long, would dim brilliant butterfly wings. The trays, therefore, are stacked in a thousand steel cases, so that at a glance the museum seems to be a plain room, containing only rows of cabinets.
Vivid tropical butterflies which are, perhaps, the most spectacular members of the collection, are rivaled in interest by 11,000 kinds of beetles, 2,000 species of leaf hoppers, 114 kinds of June bugs, and countless others; Emphasis is placed on insects native to the United States.
G.I.'s Contribute to Collection
Fermer students serving in the armed forces in the Pacific have sent valuable additions to the collection. The Snow exhibit of "water boatmen" and "backswimmers" is the largest in the world. Also the most complete in existence, is the collection of insects found in Kansas and neighboring states.
Chancellor Is Early Collector
In the early days when the University had three teachers and 55 students, Dr. Snow, a 26-year-old professor, taught natural history. His intense industry in the study and collecting of insects soon led to his appointment as professor of entomology. His sharp interest sparked his students, who helped him start the collection now in the museum.
After he became chancellor in 1890, Dr. Snow still found time for his collection, sometimes rising at 3:30 a.m. to work in his insect room by lamplight, until breakfast and administrative duties called him away, and spending afternoons with his insects when possible. When he retired as chancellor in 1908, the Board of regents officially named the collection the "Francis Huntington Snow Entomological museum."
First Trip Nets 5.000 Bugs
Five hundred insects collected and
mounted in 1870 formed the nucleus of the collection. A few years later, when a group of students planned a collecting trip to Colorado Springs and Pike's peak, they asked Dr. Snow to accompany them. This, the first of his 28 field trips, added 5,000 specimens to the new collection.
Dr. Snow's journals, which have been preserved with his desk and first microscope, tell of these early trips. Each summer found the group in some new region in the southwest, often Arizona or New Mexico. Going by train with special passes issued to scientific expeditions, they camped in the open, were often bothered by Indians, and, after two or three months of collecting, used horses to trek back to civilization, laden with thousands of new specimens.
Beetles Boost Collection
Judiciously trading some of these to other collectors and museums, during the next few years, Dr. Snow was able to make valuable additions to his own growing collection. One tiger beetle often was worth a whole case containing a thousand other specimens.
A bottle of beetles brought the embryonic collection a big boost. In western Kansas with two students in 1776, Dr. Snow found a few specimens of the rare tiger beetle, then worth $50 apice. Having a literal field day, the three gathered 1,170 of the precious large, brownish and black insects, previously almost unknown.
Beamer Adds Specimens
After Dr. Snow's death in 1911, there was no one to take an active interest in the collection, and no significant additions were made for several years. Then Dr. Raymond H. Beamer joined the entomology staff, and resumed the collecting trips. Every summer until the war, Dr. and Mrs. Beamer, with groups of students who received University credit for the work, travelled as much as 10,000 miles, always returning with more than 50,000 specimens. The 1941 trip yielded a record of 75,000 additions.
The entomologists usually slept in tents, collecting during the day. Some of the rarer insects like night life, however, and were lured by a powerful light, to bump against a sheet and be scooped up by the
Bug-Catchers Had Night Shift
ATTENTION AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHERS
Do you have a Squad or Team Picture of the 1944 KANSAS FOOTBALL TEAM-one that we can enlarge for our Store Collection-
If so! We Want to See You!
"dummy" of a nightly bridge game. One member of the party would "pin" some insects in the field, while others were rotten-cushioned in boxes and sent back to the University for preparation.
The collection contains 20.00% priceless, irreplaceable type specimens, marked with red labels. A type is the actual specimen which was the first of its kind 'described and named by a scientist. These are the final authority for identifying later specimens of the same kind. A museum is valued, largely, by the number of types it possesses.
Because the collection has grown so fast and because, during the war, Dr. Beamer has been unable to obtain sufficient help, it will be several years before the thousands of new specimens now waiting in the Snow hall laboratory are grouped and sent to specialists for classification.
20 000 Types Represented
Two years of exhaustive research resulted in the discovery of this formula modern, scientific laboratory resources perfected it NOW, and only now.
29,000 Types Represented
Insects, which comprise more than half of all living creatures, evolve rapidly, and man has not discovered nearly all the existing species. The Francis Huntington Snow museum is
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noted because it has many types, keeps up to date through constant additions, and is available for study by specialists from all over the United States.
Some Easterners have suggested that the collection be moved east of the Mississippi. It is far more appropriate that it remain here, in the center of the country, where students in the university which originated it may visit it.
Some day, between classes, go calling on two million bugs.
Dr. E. G. Kennedy and Dr. C. B. Althaus of the vocational guidance bureau are in Kansas City today conferring with representatives of the Veterans' administration on problems of veterans' guidance. They also are making a tour of training institutions in Kansas City available to veterans.
Veterans Bureau Men Confer
Argentine Students Plan Protest Strike
Buenos Aires, Sept. 28. —(UP)— Reliable sources said today that Argentine University students were planning a general student strike in protest against the military government's arrest of liberal leaders.
Among those held by the government are the presidents of the Buenos Aires, Litoral, Tucuman and Cordoba universities.
Striking students at Buehos Aires University called on all students to join them in united action.
The federation of university students at Tucuman issued a similar proclamation yesterday in protest against the wave of arrests.
Mythical man-like monsters permeate the folk-lore of all peoples.
A FLIGHT THAT NEVER LEAVES THE GROUND
At remote controls the instructor follows the "flight," sets up various dangerous conditions, coordinates the crew's reactions.
A bomber crew needs training as a team. And now those hazards which are too dangerous for air-borne drill can be duplicated on the ground. This is made possible by an electronic flight trainer perfected by Bell Telephone Laboratories' scientists for the Navy.
Tubes glow, switches click much as they do in a telephone exchange, to duplicate such flight perils as icing. fouled fuel lines, "conked" motors. It is the science behind the telephone that here performs another new service to the Nation.
BELL TELEPHONE SYSTEM
"Service to the Nation in Peace and War"