THE KANSAN.
UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS
VOLUME V.
LAWRENCE, KANSAS, SEPTEMBER 22, 1908.
DR. F. H. SNOW IS DEAD
FORMER CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY PASSED AWAY AT DELAFIELD, WISCONSIN.
Was a Member of the First Faculty and Helped to Organize the Courses and Classes for the First Session Forty=Two Years Ago.
Last spring Dr. Snow was forced to quit active work in the University and seek a change of climate for his health. He went to Bonner Springs Sanitarium where he remained for several weeks. This summer he went to Delavan Lake, Wisconsin, and has been at that place and at Hessel, Michigan, all summer in hopes of bettering his failing health.
The immediate cause of his death was heart failure. Twenty minutes before that time he was feeling as well as usual. No members of the family were present at the time of his death. Charles Siler, a former University student, was with him.
Francis Huntington Snow, former chancellor of the University and a scholar and scientist of world-wide fame, died at Delafield, Wisconsin, Sunday morning at 7:30 o'clock, after an illness of more than a year.
During the forty-two years of the history of the University Dr. Snow has been connected in some way with the institution. He was chancellor for eleven years, was one of the first faculty which consisted of three men, and has held an important place in the school up to the time of his death. He secured for Kansas a collection of insects worth $50,000 and second only to that of Harvard. The magnificent Museum and Gellar Hall.
Snow Hall named in his honor are the direct results of his labors.
He was born in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, June 29, 1840. Here he spent his early childhood with his parents, and attained honors in the public and high schools of that place. After graduation from high school he entered college and began a life that was to be spent in educational work. He received A.B., A.M., Ph.D. degrees from Williams College; was graduated from Andover Theological Seminary in 1866 and ordained minister of the Congregational church at the same time; and received the Doctor of Law degree from Princeton in 1890.
In 1866 he came to Lawrence and took a chair of Mathematics. The University was then housed in old North College. The faculty at that time consisted of D. H. Robinson, E. J. Rice and Dr. Snow, and the advantages offered by the school were meager indeed.
With all possible chance for improving the conditions as he found them, Professor Snow began his work in the University. For forty-two years he continued his efforts and watched the school grow from one poor building to a great educational system of many well equipped buildings and a faculty of several hundred men and a student body of more than 2000. In 1890 he was appointed chancellor, a position he held for eleven years. Although he performed his duties as chief executive faithfully, he did not like the task and gladly resigned in 1901 and went back to his work in science which he continued practically up to his death.
Dr. Snow married Jane Appleton Aiken in Andover, Mass., July 8, 1868. To this union six children were born, four of whom are now living. The great grief of Dr. Snow's life was the death of his son,
FRANCIS HUNTINGTON SNOW
NUMBER ;
Will Snow, who fell from a press launch and was drowned in San Francisco harbor on the return of the Twentieth Kansas from the Philippines. The Government granted Dr. Snow the use of a vessel to aid in searching for the body. The remaining members of the family are, Miss Edith Snow and mother, Mrs. William Harvey Brown, Rhodesia, Africa; Mrs. Professor E.C. Gase, Michigan University; and Frank Snow, of Chicago
At the time Dr. Snow came to the University he aspired to the chair of Greek, but in the apportionment of subjects was given mathematics and natural science. Soon he became so interested in entomology that he made it his life work, and the University's present magnificent collection is a monument to his devotion and untiring energy. In nearly every year of his University service
he made one or more expeditions in search of specimens. The last one was made in 1907 to Arizona. On that trip Dr. Snow was bitten by a Gila monster but suffered no ill effects. On these trips many new kinds of insects were found and classified, and a number of varieties have been named after Dr. Snow by scientists all over the country.
On the expedition of 1871 the Snow party narrowly escaped being massacred by the Apache Indians in New Mexico.
In the early 90's Dr. Snow won fame for the University and himself by discovering a method of inoculating chinch bugs with a disease which rapidly swept this pest from the farms of the State. This service to the State was largely influential in removing the prejudice which regarded the University as a place of impractical theorists.
Among the works of Dr. Snow was the creation of the meteorological bureau at the University. Ever since the second year of the University's existence a daily record of weather conditions has been kept, and until his retirement from active service Dr. Snow himself prepared the monthly weather summary which is sent by the University to the publications of the State.
Dr. Snow's ill health dates from the time his son Will was drowned in San Francisco harbor. When he returned from his unsuccessful search for the body he was broken in spirit, out by sheer determination kept at his work until fifteen months ago when bodily weakness compelled his retirement.
FUNERAL SERVICES.
The fneral services will be held at the family residence at 3 o'clock Thursday. On the day of the services there will be no classes in the University.
Chapel Friday.
Chapel services will be held Friday as announced.
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Ex-Kansan Gets Appointment. Dr. George I. Adams, A. B. 93, has been recently appointed by the government as head of the geological survey in the Philippine Islands under the control of the United States Geological Survey and which will conduct work similar to that done in this country. Dr. Adams returned only last February from South America where for nearly three years he had been preparing a Hydrographic Survey of Peru for that government.
Dr. Snow-An Appreciation.
Some one has fitly said that in the presence of death all things become trite. Words were not made to express the gratitude that a people feel for a friend or public benefactor who has given a life of splendid service to a cause, or an institution which they love, but when death comes it is no more than due the one who is gone that the living attest as far as words will permit the esteem of those with whom his life was spent.
In the death of Dr. Snow the University and the people of Kansas have lost a friend whose life was given to their service with a seeming unselfishness rarely found. In his death the last tie that bound the beginning to the present has been broken. Forty-two years ago he came to the institution with which his life was passed. How different the conditions of then and now. The nation had not yet emerged from the pall of sorrow cast by a bloody war and bleeding Kansas was still a reality of the times. The University was smaller than a hundred high schools in the Kansas of today.
The ex-chancellor came to Kansas in the days when even the professor must have something of the rugged pioneer in his make up and this he had to an eminent degree. He with the others toiled and struggled, and was content with little things but always kept his gaze towards the greater things that he knew his toil was bringing. He was forced to suffer the stings of ridicule for higher education was an unpopular thing in the pioneer community. But he battled against the odds that surrounded him. He was always devoted to the institution, he watched it grow and he became its head, but all the time he was growing older and the weight of years began to leave their mark. Despite the growing infirmities of age he labored on and on until the school he had started became one of the greatest in the west. But his hair was now white and the buoyancy of youth had been lost in the long years of labor. A tragedy, the drowning of a favorite son, may have helped to hasten the end. Dr. Snow had not quite reached the allotted span of life but he had lived long enough to see the institution upon which the labors of a life time were expended become a great, a growing, institution. Perhaps this thought comforted him in his dying hour and helped to steal away the range of dissolution.
The state has lost one of its greatest benefactors, the University a man who has done more than any other to bring the school to its present high position and the educational world one of its greatest scholars. But the result of his labors is not a thing that will perish while the state has a place for a university or the world a place for science.