William Temple Hornaday
William Temple Hornaday (born December 1, 1854 in Avon (Indiana) , † March 6, 1937 in Stamford (Connecticut) ) was an American taxidermist and zoo director.
Life
William Temple Hornaday was born in Avon, Indiana and grew up with one birth and seven step-siblings on his parents' farm, William and Mary Hornaday. In 1858 the family moved to Iowa , where they again lived on a farm. William Temple Hornaday lost his parents when he was fifteen.
He was educated at Oskaloosa College in Iowa and at Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now Iowa State University ), but left the latter in 1873 without a degree and became an assistant at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester (New York) , where he was up to Worked in 1882. Several expeditions took place during this period. The first took him to the southeastern United States, later to Asia and finally around the world. In 1885 he wrote the book "Two Years in the Jungle" about it. In 1879, after returning from the last three-year expedition, he married Josephine Chamberlain of Battle Creek, Michigan . The marriage produced a daughter.
Dissatisfied with the state of taxidermy at that time, he developed new methods and forms of presentation. He wanted to depict the animals in as realistic an ambience as possible and demonstrated his ideas to the public with the orangutan diorama “A Fight in the Treetops” in 1879. In 1880 he was one of the founders of the Society of American Taxidermists.
Two years later he became head taxidermist at the US National Museum in Washington and remained so until 1890. An expedition in 1886 brought him to the fore the drastic endangerment of the American bison and other North American animal species. He wrote about the book "The Extermination of the American Bison", which appeared in 1889, and numerous articles, and was committed to the protection of endangered species. To protect the animals, he founded the Department of Living Animals and tried to create some kind of reserves to preserve the animals. His concept was torpedoed by Samuel P. Langley , which is why Hornaday initially withdrew into private life and lived in Buffalo (New York) as a realtor and writer. In 1891 his work "Taxidermy and Zoological Collecting" came out.
In 1896 he became director of the New York Zoo in the Bronx , which he designed and managed until 1926. He tried to make this zoo close to nature and established the National Heads and Horns Museum there . He gained a dubious reputation with the idea, which he also realized , to lock the pygmy Ota Benga , which he had "borrowed" from the Natural History Museum in New York, in a monkey cage and to exhibit it like an animal during the low-visitor winter of 1906, what a lively visitor response cared. He was also strongly committed to protecting endangered animals. One of the results was the Alascan Game Act of 1902. The Bayne Law came into effect in 1911 , and in the years that followed Hornaday had success in fighting migratory birds, establishing bison reserves, and protecting seals and harbor seals. In recognition for his commitment in 1958 the named UK Antarctic Place-Names Committee to Hornaday rock at him, a clip rocks off the coast of South Georgia in the South Atlantic.
Works
In addition to the books already mentioned and numerous smaller publications, Hornaday wrote Free Rum on the Congo (1887), American Natural History (1904), Our Vanishing Wild Life (1913), Wild Life Conservation in Theory and Practice (1914), Tales from Nature's Wonderlands (1924), My Fifty-Four Years with Animal Life (1929), and Thirty Years War for Wild Life (1931). In 1905 Hornaday first described the Ursus americanus kermodei .
Others
The Hornaday River is named after Hornaday .
literature
- Keir Brooks Sterling et al. (Ed.), Biographical Dictionary of American and Canadian Naturalists and Environmentalists , Greenwood Pub Group Inc 1997, ISBN 0-313-23047-1 , p. 378 ff.
- Shepard Krech, John Robert McNeill, Carolyn Merchan, Encyclopedia of World Environmental History , Routledge 2003, ISBN 0-415-93734-5 , pp. 645 f.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ It's official: Ouabache SP bison are America's mammal. Indiana Department of National Resources from May 17, 2016, accessed October 9, 2018. However, the place of birth is also (a farm) "outside of Avon" ( Wildlife Conservation Society - About Hornaday ) and "near Plainfield " ( Modern American Environmentalists: A Biographical Encyclopedia, Johns Hopkins University Press 2009 ), so perhaps on a farm between these two locations seven kilometers apart.
- ↑ http://siarchives.si.edu/history/exhibits/documents/hornaday.htm
- ↑ http://www.gutenberg.org/files/17748/17748-h/17748-h.htm
- ↑ https://web.archive.org/web/20121214160423/http://einestages.spiegel.de/s/tb/26053/ota-benga-der-pygmaee-im-zoo.html
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Hornaday, William Temple |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American taxidermist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | December 1, 1854 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Avon (Indiana) |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 6, 1937 |
| Place of death | Stamford, Connecticut |