A carte de visite of Benjamin Franklin Mudge, 1817-1879, who was the first State Geologist of Kansas. Mudge was elected professor of geology and associated sciences at the Kansas State Agricultural College. He published the first "Geology of Kansas" a sixty-five page report issued in 1866, and the first geological map of the state in 1875. He was also a founding member of the Kansas Natural History Society which became the Kansas Academy of Science. Mudge, who gathered the nucleus of the college's mineral collection, was later remembered as one of the foremost pioneer scientists of Kansas.