OBITUARY

Southland Times, Issue 22733, 8 November 1935, Page 7

OBITUARY

REV. WILLIAM SUNDAY.

WELL-KNOWN EVANGELIST.

(United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright.) (Rec. 8.20 p.m.) Chicago, November 6. The death has occurred of the Rev. William Sunday, the evangelist, from angina pectoris. He was 72 years of age.

William Ashley Sunday, the American evangelist, was born at Ames, lowa, in November, 1863, and educated at the North-Western University and Westminister College, New Wilmington. From 1883 to 1890 he was a professional baseball player in the Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia teams of the National League and then made a big change in his career by becoming assistant secretary of the Chicago branch of the Y.M.C.A. In 1896 he gave up that post to be a roving evangelist. His methods were original. He employed the very vivid, but strangecoined phrases which made the language of the baseball field distinct from that of any other sport. His appeal was to the people and he reached them through their understanding of the popular game. He was soon recognized as a great character. Enormous crowds attended his meetings, and he addressed them with unrestrained freedom in the slang of baseball, applying at times the roughest terms of that game in Biblical exhortations. If he thought that an expression so coarse as to be barely printable would best drive home a point, he used it. In 1903 he was ordained a minister of the Presbyterian Church by the Chicago Presbytery and next year began his most intensive campaign. His methods of appeal appear to have suited his audiences admirably, for he claimed that in the next three years he won “from 1000 to 3000 converts a month.” In 1912 the Westminster College conferred on him the degree of D.D. He continued his evangelistic tours of the chief cities of the United States, concerning himself mainly with a fierce condemnation of alcohol. In 1918 the Chicago Presbytery elected him its delegate to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church at Columbus, Ohio. In the Presidential election campaign of 1928 his enthusiasm for Prohibition led him to apply in the pulpit to “Al” Smith, the Democratic candidate, an epithet that was even too much for an audience accustomed to his verbal extremes. Some members of his congregation went out and procured rotten apples and, returning, pelted him until he fled from the church. It is understood that he saw no reason for being abashed by the incident.

MR HENRY FAIRFIELD OSBORN.

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST.

(United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright.) (Rec. 8.20 p.m.) New York, Nov. 6.

The death is announced of Henry Fairfield Osborn, aged 78, scientist, author and explorer. He died of heart disease.

Dr Osborn, the famous American anthropologist, was born at Fairfield, Connecticut, in August, 1857, and educated at Princeton University where he took the B.A. and B.Sc. degrees. In 1881 he was appointed professor of natural science at Princeton and two years later was promoted to the comparative anatomy chair. It was soon recognized that he was a scientist of exceptional ability and in the next 13 years he was professor of biology and zoology at Princeton and also for part of the period Dean of the Faculty of Pure Science at Columbia and curator of the department of vertebrate palaeontology. In 1910 Princeton made him its permanent research professor in zoology and later the Government employed him in the geological survey of the United States and eventually made him its senior geologist. Meanwhile, he had been recording the results of his observations on prehistoric life, his first book being “From the Greeks to Darwin” (1894) and his second “The Age of Mammals” (1910). These were followed by “Men of the Old Stone Age” (1915) and “Origin and Evolution of Life” (1917). Until then he was a supporter of Darwin’s theory of the evolution of man from ape-like creatures. Researches based on recent discoveries .aroused doubts in his mind, however, and the results of explorations in the Gobi Desert of Central Asia seemed to justify these doubts. He accompanied Roy Chapman Andrews on one of his Gobi expeditions and the discoveries then made completed his change of view. In December, 1929, he declared his conviction that man and monkey had no common ancestor and that the ape-man was a myth. Man, he held, had been human all through his evolution and he pictured the first man as having lived in the invigorating uplands of the Gobi Desert, a country totally unfitted for any form of anthropoid ape. He was convinced that further explorations by Andrews and himself would produce evidence that could not be assailed. Dr. Osborn received degrees from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Columbia and Oslo.