lacier grew steeper and more difficult, until he reached a point
where he could not advance any further, and found, to his consternation,
that he could not return by the way he had come. There he clung to the side
of the immense glacier, ready, should he miss his hold, to be plunged
hundreds of feet into a deep chasm. The situation flashed over him, and he
knew now it was, indeed, a struggle for dear life. With a precarious
foothold, he clung to the glacier with one hand, while with his pocket
knife he cut a safer foothold with the other. Resting a little, he cut
another foothold lower down in the hard snow, and so worked his way after a
severe struggle of several hours amid constant danger to the foot of the
mountain in safety. "But," continued the professor, speaking of this
incident to some of his friends, "I was richly repaid for all my trouble
and peril, for when I reached the foot of the mountain I captured a new and
very rare species of butterfly." Multitudes of practical men cannot
appreciate such devotion to pure science, but it is this absorbing passion
and pure grit that enable the devotees of science to enlarge its boundaries
year by year.

Once, while on a scientific excursion on the great plains, with the
lamented Prof. Mudge, he nearly lost his life. He had captured a
rattlesnake, and, in trying to introduce it into a jar filled with alcohol,
the snake managed to bite him on the hand. The arm was immediately bound
tightly with a handkerchief, and the wound enlarged with a pocket knife,
and both professors took turns in sucking it as clean as possible, and
ejecting the poison from their mouths. This and a heavy dose of spirits
brought the professor through in safety, although the poison remaining in
the wound caused considerable swelling and pain in the hand and arm. When
this incident was mentioned in the Kansas Academy of Science that year,
some one said, "Now we know the effect of the bite of the prairie
rattlesnake on the human system. Let some one, in the interests of pure
science, try the effect of the timber rattlesnake on the human system." But
like the mice in the fable, no one was found who cared to put the bell on
the cat.

Professors Mudge and Snow, because scientists were so few in the State at
that early day, divided the field of natural science between themselves,
the former taking geology and the latter living forms. Professor Mudge
built up at the agricultural college a royal cabinet, easi