the
basin of the Kansas and Arkansas Rivers, between Nebraska on the N. and
Oklahoma on the S., with Colorado on the W. and Missouri on the E. It is
a rolling prairie, with a fine climate subject to occasional extremes,
and a rainfall, except in some districts, sufficient; raises crops of
grain and sugar, and affords excellent grazing ground. Pork and beef
packing, flour-milling, and iron-founding industries are carried on. The
State University is at Lawrence, an agricultural college at Manhattan,
and good schools in every town. Previous to its admission to the Union in
1859 Kansas was the scene of violent conflicts between pro- and
anti-slavery parties for five years. In the Civil War it joined the
North. The capital is Topeka (31), and the largest other towns Kansas
City (38) and Wichita (23).

KANSAS CITY, two contiguous towns on the S. bank of the Missouri
River, 280 m. W. of St. Louis, are so called. The larger and more
easterly one (164) is the second city of Missouri; an important railway
centre, and distributes the agricultural products of a large region; has
pork-packing industries and iron manufactures. The smaller, westerly city
(51), is in Kansas, the largest town of that State; has a remarkable
elevated railway.

KANT, IMMANUEL, a celebrated German philosopher, born in Koenigsberg,
the son of a saddler, of Scotch descent, and fortunate in both his
parents; entered the university in 1740 as a student of theology; gave
himself to the study of philosophy, mathematics, and physics; wrote an
essay, his first literary effort, on "Motive Force" in 1747; settled at
the University as a private lecturer on a variety of academic subjects in
1755; became professor of Logic and Metaphysics in 1770, when he was 46,
and continued till his retirement, in 1797, from the frailties of age,
spending the last 17 years of his life in a small house with a garden in
a quiet quarter of the town; his great work, the "Kritic of Pure Reason,"
was published in 1781, and it was followed by the "Kritic of Practical
Reason" in 1788, and the "Kritic of Judgment" in 1790; his works
inaugurate a new era in philosophic speculation, and by the adoption of a
critical method dealt a death-blow to speculative dogmatism on the one
hand and scepticism on the other; it was, he says, the scepticism of Hume
that first broke his dogmatic slumber, so that had Hume not been, he had
not been, and the whole course of modern thought different; Kant by