 At the same time, he and Hilgard are credited as halting determined efforts by the Grange and other agricultural interests that would have split the College of Agriculture off from the University of California system.From 1877 to 1906, he was a member (and later secretary and president) of the San Francisco Microscopical Society, an organization that championed the emerging use of microscopy for scientific research.The society went defunct after its laboratory was destroyed in the 1906 earthquake.