James Ellsworth De Kay

James Ellsworth De Kay (born October 12, 1792 in Lisbon , Portugal , † November 21, 1851 in Oyster Bay , New York ; often written DeKay ) was an American zoologist .

Life

De Kay was born in Portugal to a wealthy American captain and an Irish woman. At fourteen he was an orphan, but had a sizable inheritance. 1807-12 he studied at Yale College , but finished the course without a degree. He later continued his studies at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he finally received his doctorate in medicine in 1819. Back in America, however, he did not specialize in medicine, but in natural history and became one of the leading figures in the natural history society of New York, the Lyceum of Natural History. He was also involved in the literary circles of New York and associated with knickerbockers such as Washington Irving , James Fenimore Cooper and especially his brother-in-law Joseph Rodman Drake and his bosom friend Fitz-Greene Halleck . In 1837 he was a founding member of the Authors Club , a literary club presided over by Washington as president and Hallkeck as vice president.

In 1821 he married Janet Eckford, a daughter of the shipbuilder Henry Eckford . After he had received the order to build a frigate for the fleet of the Ottoman Empire , De Kay sailed with his father-in-law to the ship transfer to Turkey, where he stayed for a year. After his return to America - Eckford died in Constantinople in 1832 - De Kay published his travel impressions in 1833 as Sketches of Turkey in 1831 and 1832 by an American. In it he drew a very benevolent picture of the Ottoman Empire and thus turned the American Philhellenes against him. His descriptions of Asiatic cholera received particular attention . De Kay promoted port wine as an effective medicine against this infectious disease , which led to it becoming a New York fashion drink for a short time. As a result, it was often referred to at New York counters as Dr. DeKay served .

De Kay's greatest achievement he made in the context of the Geological Survey of New York, an inventory of the geology, but also of the fauna and flora of New York, which the legislature of the state had commissioned in 1835. De Kay acted as the editor of the zoological volumes. The five-volume Zoology of New-York; or, the New York Fauna appeared 1842-44, an expanded catalog in 1851 as Catalog of the Cabinet of Natural History of the State of New York and of the Historical and Antiquarian Collection Annexed Thereto. De Kay's selection of the species presented in it was by no means limited to the fauna of New York, but even included all animal species that are found in the United States, such as the manatee that only occurs in Florida . In total, the list of animal species cataloged by De Kay comprised around 1,600 entries. He actually described only relatively few species himself , for example the blind cave fish Amblyopsis spelaea (originally Amblyopsis spelaeus ) in 1842 using a museum specimen and the trilobite Isotelus gigas in 1824 .

Web links

• James Ellsworth De Kay ( Memento of February 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) - Entry in the Biographical Dictionary of Hypogean Fish Researchers