Alpheus Hyatt

Alpheus Hyatt

Alpheus Hyatt (born April 5, 1838 in Washington, DC , † January 15, 1902 in Cambridge , Massachusetts ) was an American zoologist, entomologist and paleontologist . Along with Edward Drinker Cope, he was one of the most famous American exponents of Neo- Lamarckism .

Hyatt was the son of one of Baltimore's leading merchants. He studied at Yale University from 1856 , but was sent to Rome by his mother in 1857 to prepare for a career as a priest. Hyatt opposed it and studied from 1858 to 1862 under Louis Agassiz at Harvard University zoology and paleontology. Together with Addison Emery Verrill and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler , he studied the invertebrate fauna of the Atlantic coast (1860 Mount Desert Island , Maine, and 1861 under Jules Marcou on Anticosti Island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence ) while studying . At Harvard he was mainly a student of the botanist (and Darwin fanatic) Asa Gray and Jeffries Wyman and received his bachelor's degree in 1862 with top marks (awarded in 1864). Hyatt, he and other students were among those who did not follow Agassiz's rejection of Darwin's ideas (made public in 1860). After his studies he served from 1863 as a Massachusetts Volunteers in the Civil War (American Civil War), first as a private and at the end of the Civil War as a captain.

In 1867 he went (following his Harvard fellow student Frederic Ward Putnam ) to Salem , Massachusetts and worked as a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum (then Essex Institute). In the same year he was with Frederic Ward Putnam, Edward Sylvester Morse , Alpheus Spring Packard founder of the American Naturalist magazine . From 1870 to 1888 he was professor of zoology and paleontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and from 1877 until his death in 1902 professor of biology and zoology at the College of Arts and Sciences (formerly College of Liberal Arts) at Boston University . He was also a curator of the Boston Society of Natural History and founded a marine biology laboratory in Annisquam , Massachusetts on a tidal current, the Annisquam River. The laboratory later moved to Woods Hole and in 1888 the famous Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory was established .

Together with his colleague Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon , he was the first to describe the beak flies (Mecoptera) and the mayflies (Ephemeroptera).

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1869), the National Academy of Sciences (1875) and the American Philosophical Society (1895). In 1898 he received an honorary doctorate from Brown University .

In 1867 he married Audella Beebe, their daughter was the American sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and the daughter Harriett Randolph Hyatt Mayor was also a sculptor. They also had a son, Alpheus Hyatt III.

Publications

Some of his most important works:

• Observations on Polyzoa (1866-68)
• On the Parallelism between the Different Stages of the Life of the Individual and those of the Entire Group of the Molluscous Order Tetribranehiata (1867)
• Fossil Cephalopods of the Museum of Comparative Zoology; Embryology (1867)
• The Genesis of the Tertiary Species of Planorbis at Steinheim (1880)
• Genera of Fossil Cephalopods (1883–84)
• Evolution of the Cephalopoda (1884)
• with Jennie Maria Arms (Sheldon): Insecta , Boston: Heath 1890
• Bioplastology and the Belated Branches of Biological Research (1893)
• Common Hydroids, corals, and echinoderms , Boston: Heath 1897
• with James Perrin Smith : Triassic Cephalopod Genera of America, US Geological Survey Papers, 40, 1905, pp. 1-394
• Pseudoceratites of The Cretaceous , Monographs of the United States Geological Survey, 44, 1903 (editor TW Stanton)

Web links

• Memorandum on Alpheus Hyatt (National Academy of Sciences) (pdf; English; 703 kB)

References and comments

1. ↑ David L. Browman, Stephen Williams: Anthropology at Harvard. A biographical history, Harvard University Press 2013, p. 61
2. ^ Member History: Alpheus Hyatt. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 8, 2018 .