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Henry Prentiss Armsby, Ph.B. 1874

Born September 21, 1853, in Whitinsville, Mass.
Died October 19, 1921, at State College, Pa.

Henry Prentiss Armsby was born September 21, 1853, in Whitinsville, Mass., the son of Lewis Armsby, a pattern maker with the firm of P. Whitin & Sons, and Mary Ann (Prentiss) Armsby. His father was the son of Joshua Armsby, Jr., and Martha (McClellan) Armsby, and a descendant of Enos Armsby, who settled at Sutton, Mass., in 1786. The Prentiss family lived at Northbndge, Mass.

Henry Armsby received his early education at the high school in Millbury, Mass., and then studied at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he was graduated with the degree of B.S. in 1871. He remained there for another year as an assistant in chemistry, and then entered the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale, taking the chemistry course.

He was a teacher of natural science at the Fitchburg (Mass.) High School during 1874-75, spent the following year at the University of Leipsic, and then served for a year as an assistant in chemistry at Rutgers College. From 1877 to 1881 he was connected with the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station as a chemist, after which he served for two years as vice-principal of the Storrs Agricultural School (now the Connecticut Agricultural College). He then spent four years as professor of agricultural chemistry and associate director of the Experiment Station at the University of Wisconsin. In 1887 he became director of the Agricultural Experiment Station at the Pennsylvania State College, and served in this capacity for the next twenty years, from 1890 to 1902 also being dean of the School of Agriculture. In 1907 he resigned to devote himself exclusively to research, and at that time was placed in charge of the Institute of Animal Nutrition which had just been established at the college. He continued to serve as its director and as professor of animal nutrition until his death. While serving as director of the Experiment Station at the college, Dr Armsby designed and had constructed a respiration calorimeter for the purpose of testing the nutriment values of various foodstuffs on animals, the first of its kind in the world, and the only one of its kind in this country. The United States Department of Agriculture, with which he had been connected as an expert since 1898, aided him with its construction. Dr. Armsby was chairman of the committee on cooperative experiment station exhibits and a member of the committee on dairy tests at the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 and at the Paris Exposition in 1900. He had served as president of the Association of American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations (1898-99), the Society for the Promotion of Agricultural Science (1905-07), and the American Society of Animal Nutrition (1908-1911). He was a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, the American Physiological Society, and the American Society of Biological Chemists (on whose council he served in 1907), and a foreign member of the Royal Academy of Agriculture of Sweden. He became a member of the National Academy of Science in April, 1920. In 1917 he was appointed a member of the committee on agriculture of the National Research Council, and the next year served on the Inter-Allied Scientific Food Commission. For six months before his death he had been actively engaged in making plans for the greatest research nutrition investigation ever undertaken, and in that connection spent much time in Washington in the spring and summer of 1921. He had contributed numerous scientific articles to various journals, and was the author of A Manual of Cattle Feeding (1880), The Farmers' Annual Handbook (with E. H. Jenkins, '72; 1882-83), Principles of Animal Nutrition (1903), and "The Nutrition of Farm Animals (1917). He received the degree of Ph.D. at Yale in 1879, after a year of graduate study in the Sheffield Scientific School [while he was connected with the Connecticut Agricultural College], and in 1920 Yale conferred the honorary degree of Sc.D. upon him. The Worcester Polytechnic Institute gave him the same degree in 1921, and the University of Wisconsin that of LL.D. in 1904. He had been a member of Congregational churches in Millbury, Mass., and Madison, Wis., serving as a deacon of the latter church in 1880-81, but since 1910 had belonged to St. Andrew's Mission (Protestant Episcopal) at State College, of which he was for several years a vestryman.

He died at State College, October 19, 1921, of cerebral hemorrhage, after an illness of five weeks. He was taken ill early in September and was granted a leave of absence to enable him to regain his health. He had planned to go South, but his condition did not improve sufficiently to permit the journey He was buried in Pine Hall Cemetery at State College.

Dr Armsby was married October 15, 1878, in Millbury, to Lucy Atwood, daughter of Charles Lee and Betsy (Atwood) Harding. She survives him with their five sons, Charles Lewis, Ernest Harding, Sidney Prentiss, Henry Horton, and Edward McClellan The sons are all graduates of Pennsylvania State College, having received the degree of B.S. there in 1904, 1905, 1910, 1911, and 1913, respectively.