Alpheus Spring Packard
Alpheus Spring Packard junior (born February 19, 1839 in Brunswick (Maine) , † February 14, 1905 in Providence (Rhode Island) ) was an American entomologist and paleontologist.
He was the son of Alpheus Spring Packard, Sr. (1798-1884), Professor of Classical Philology and President of Bowdoin College , Brunswick, and brother of William Alfred Packard (1830-1909), Professor of Classical Philology at Princeton. He studied at Bowdoin College and took part in a first scientific expedition to Labrador in 1860. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1861, he took part in the scientific survey of Maine as an entomologist. He then continued his studies with Louis Agassiz at Harvard, but at the same time studied medicine with an MD degree in 1864. He was then briefly a military doctor in the American Civil War and then became curator and librarian of the Boston Society for Natural History. In 1867 he published the results of his Labrador expeditions. Then he was at the newly founded Peabody Academy of Science (as well as three other Agassiz students Alpheus Hyatt , Frederic Ward Putnam and Edward Sylvester Morse ) before becoming professor of zoology and geology at Brown University in 1878 .
With Morse, Hyatt, and Putnam, he founded the American Naturalist magazine in 1867 .
From 1871 to 1873 he was a State Entomologist of Massachusetts and lectured on insects at the agricultural colleges of Maine and Massachusetts. After some devastating locust plagues in the USA, he became a member of the newly established Entomological Commission of the USA. He also studied marine invertebrates, embryology and insect metamorphosis and the mammoth cave fauna , which is why he became an assistant at the Kentucky Geological Survey in 1874 and explored other caves in Kentucky. Packard was a neo-Lamarckist and wrote a biography of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck .
He married in 1867 and had four children.
Packard had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1872 . In 1868 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .
Fonts
- Guide to the Study of Insects 1869
- with FW Putnam : The Mammoth Cave and its Inhabitants 1872
- Our Common Insects 1873, Gutenberg
- Half-Hours with Insects 1876
- Life Histories of Animals 1876
- Entomology for Beginners 1888
- A Naturalist on the Labrador Coast 1891
- Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution: His Life and Work 1901, Gutenberg
- Zoology for High Schools and Colleges, 11th edition, 1904
- Monograph of the Bombycine Moths of North America, 3 parts, 1895, 1905, 1915 (edited by TDA Cockerell).
literature
- George Sterling Kingsley, Sketch of Alpheus Spring Packard, Popular Science Monthly, Volume 33, 1888, Wikisource
- TDA Cockerell Biographical Memoir National Academy, 1920, pdf
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Packard, Alpheus Spring |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American entomologist and paleontologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 19, 1839 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brunswick (Maine) |
| DATE OF DEATH | February 14, 1905 |
| Place of death | Providence (Rhode Island) |