Some years ago an incident occurred in connection with his scientific excursions in Colorado that is quite characteristic, showing his obliviousness to self and everything else save the object of his scientific pursuit, and a fertility in overcoming danger when it meets him face to face. He was descending alone from one of the highest peaks of the Rockies, when he thought he could leave the path and reach the foot of the mountain by passing directly down its side over an immense glacier of snow and ice, and thus save time and a journey of several miles. After a while his way down the glacier 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.