Edwin Lincoln Moseley papers

Edwin Lincoln Moseley was born in Union City, Michigan, on March 29, 1865. His father was a merchant, and his maternal grandfather, Hiram Bingham, was a missionary. As a high school student, he studied zoology, physiology and intellectual philosophy as well as Greek and Latin. When he graduated from Union City High School in 1880, he was fifteen years old--two years younger than any other person in the class. After a post-graduate year of high school study, Moseley enrolled at the University of Michigan and received both his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in four years. Again he was the youngest in his graduating class and one of two who received a graduate degree.

For two years following graduation he was a high school teacher in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and from 1889 to 1914, he was a teacher of natural science at the high school in Sandusky, Ohio. In 1914, he was appointed as one of the first faculty of what would become Bowling Green State University, then Bowling Green Normal College. He served as a science professor and head of the biology department, a position he maintained until his retirement in 1936. From 1936 until the close or his life, he served a curator of the University's natural history and science museum.

In the early years of his teaching career, he pioneered in the teaching of natural science by the experimental method, taking his students on many field trips, permitting them to assist him in his work of tracing the submerged valleys of Sandusky Bay with a view to opening the bay to deep-water traffic, and encouraging his students to contribute specimens for his collection. While teaching in Sandusky, he began a collection of wild plants which in time included the largest number of indigenous species ever to be gathered from such a small geographical area. While a high school teacher, he began a program of research which continued until his death, covering a study of the changes in the level of Lake Erie; the formation of Sandusky Bay and Cedar Point, Ohio; tracing of a pre-glacial valley under Huron and Erie Counties, Ohio; and the location of wells whose water was a source of typhoid fever. He studied the flora of northwest Ohio and discovered and traced the cause of milk-sickness to white snakeroot, a weed on which cattle grazed. Moseley also undertook a project in long-range weather prediction and concluded by a study of tree rings and their relative widths that a 90.4 year precipitation cycle existed.

Moseley was the author of several books, monographs, and numerous articles. An honorary doctoral degree was conferred on him by Bowling Green State University in 1943. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Botanical Society of America and numerous other professional societies and academies. He died in Bowing Green, Ohio, on June 6, 1948. Always considered somewhat eccentric and miserly in his life style, upon his death it was discovered that he had a sizeable estate, all of which he donated to Bowling Green State University to assist worthy students in need. Scholarships from this estate are still being awarded.