ALPHEUS HYATT. 439 



ALPHEUS HYATT. 



Bv Pkoi-essor W. H. DALL. 



T N the death of Professor Alpheus Hyatt, of Cambridge, philosophical 

 -*- zoology in America has sustained a loss only second to that which 

 was involved in the death of Cope. 



Alpheus Hyatt was born in the city of Washington, District of 

 Columbia, April 5, 1838. He was a scion of an old and honored Mary- 

 land family; from whom the suburban village of Hyattsville, near 

 Washington, took its name ; and which is still well represented in Balti- 

 more. He lost his father early but his mother survived to a venerable 

 age, dying in Washington hardly more than a year before her son. 



Young Hyatt was a pupil of the Maryland Military Academy, sub- 

 sequently entering the class of 1860 at Yale, but after the Freshman 

 year he left the college for a year's travel in Europe. In 1858 he went 

 to Harvard as a student of Louis Agassiz, in the Museum of Compara- 

 tive Zoology, entering the Lawrence Scientific School from which he 

 finally graduated in 1862. During the war of the Rebellion he served 

 in the Forty-seventh Massachusetts volunteer regiment and left the 

 army with the rank of captain, subsequently taking up post-graduate 

 studies in Germany. In 1867 he married Miss Andella Beebe, of Vala- 

 tia, New York, and became a curator in the celebrated Essex Institute 

 of Salem, Mass., in which so many of the naturalists and historical 

 writers of the last half century found at one time or another a con- 

 genial environment. About that time a particularly large group of 

 workers was located in or about Salem, and in connection with Morse, 

 Packard and Putnam, all ex-pupils of Agassiz, Hyatt took part in 

 founding the Peabody Academy of Sciences in Salem. These four nat- 

 uralists for some years formed its scientific staff, and by them, with 

 the help of Scudder and others, the American Naturalist was started on 

 its career of usefulness. 



In 1870 Hyatt was elected custodian and, in 1881, curator, of the 

 Boston Society of Natural History, at the same time, and for some 

 years subsequently, serving as professor of zoology and paleontolog}' at 

 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. He also had 

 charge, up to the time of his death, of the important collection of in- 

 vertebrate fossils in the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and was one 

 of the collaborators of the United States Geological Survey in its field 

 work and paleontological researches. 



